Laser vs Inkjet

[mofo]

I have LOTS of documents to print. Do toner cartridges cost a lot more than ink cartridges? And which one will give you more prints for your buck?

[pboadle]

Originally posted by mofo I have LOTS of documents to print. Do toner cartridges cost a lot more than ink cartridges? And which one will give you more prints for your buck?

If you do a lot a printing a laser will work out a lot cheaper in the long run, one thing to look for when buying a printer is that the toner cartridges can be refilled as this can cut down a lot on the running costs. I have had a Sharp JX-9400 for about nine years now and it has been pretty cheap to run except that the toner cartridges could not be refilled, not like an injet that I have that sits there doing nothing because the cartridges are to expensive to buy in regards to how many pages they will print.

[glc]

If you are printing high volumes of documents and do not need color support, a laser is more economical by a long shot. There is a big market in used and refurbished HP Laserjets for this very reason - for example, a Laserjet 4 Plus can be found for $200 or so, and one $90 cartridge (and you can find recycled refilled cartridges for half that) is good for 7000 copies - at 12 pages per minute. The printer itself is good for 100,000 copies before the fuser goes bad - replace the fuser ($200) and run it for another 100,000. I have a customer that just went over a MILLION copies with one of these with no maintenance other than cartridges, fusers, and cleaning.

[mofo]

the non-refillable cartridges is my main concern, i had bought this Lexmark color printer a while ago for under $100, but the cartridges were like $50 CDN each!! I don't know a thing about toner cartridges, are there different types and any tips on saving $$ (like re-filling the ink cartridges)?

[LawyerRon]

mofo,
No, you can't really re-fill toner cartridges yourself but you can buy refilled ones. They're usually about 1/2 the price of new. I worked for 5 years in desktop publishing and I used ONLY refilled cartridges from a local company. I got 1 bad one (in 5 years) that printed everything with a line down the center and the company promply exchanged it. And yes, I concur with glc, if you print LOTS of black and white docs the laser printer is the only way to fly. In my Law office, I use only laser printers.