Posts Tagged ‘cost per page’

The god of Dell-Fire?

Some printer companies take a certain economic stance on pricing office machines: initial cost of the machine is cheap, cost of supplies is expensive.  Other companies take an opposite approach: initial cost of the machine is expensive, supplies cost is reasonable.

Would you be surprised that many office equipment purchasers fall for the cheap initial cost machine, only to regret it later?  The allure of the cheap printer is obvious, when comparing one machine to another using machine statistics alone.  Especially without considering supplies costs it seems like a no-brainer.  But like most siren songs, this one could end up ringing in your ears for quite some time.

Dell takes quite an extreme approach.  Dell almost (and often does) gives their machines away.  The lucky owner of this printer soon realizes (we hope they do, anyways) why.  Like a child who is given a great toy at Christmas only to find out it needs an endless supply of batteries, which are so often not included, the Dell owner finds out that Dell supplies are in short supply and always running out.  In addition to this injustice to giveaways Dell also hoards its ink to the point of limiting its purchase from a very few select suppliers.  These suppliers include Dell, an individual office supply store, and the gray market.  That is it.  Whereas most other brands are available quickly from a medley of sources of the customers choosing, Dell decides to ration available supplies.

This may seem like Doc Jams is not a fan of Dell machines.  Though that is true, our main reasoning is brutally simple.  It is our job at Doc Jams Printer Repair to keep Getting You Back to Printing.  Doc Jams prides itself on the speed we are able to do this at.  Dell makes it very difficult for anyone to do that, let alone quickly.

So to those with Dell printers, you received a stellar deal we are certain.  Or did you?

Some printer companies take a certain economic stance on pricing office machines: initial cost of the machine is cheap, cost of supplies is expensive.  Other companies take an opposite approach: initial cost of the machine is expensive, supplies cost is reasonable.

Would you be surprised that many office equipment purchasers fall for the cheap initial cost machine, only to regret it later?  The allure of the cheap printer is obvious, when comparing one machine to another using machine statistics alone.  Especially without considering supplies costs it seems like a no-brainer.  But like most siren songs, this one could end up ringing in your ears for quite some time.

A few office machines companies take interesting approaches to stay competitive.  Take Xerox for example.  Xerox offers 2 very similar machines, the Phaser 8560, and the 8860.  When compared side by side the 8560 appears to be the deal of the century.  Investigating deeper reveals the reasoning, Xerox needs to position itself to compete with both the cheap to purchase machines and the cheap to run machines.  No machine offers both.  The 8860 at a substantial initial cost reveals its savings in the form of dirt cheap ink.  So cheap in fact, that it can print full color for the cost of typical black & white.  It all comes down to a few things:

1) How much are you willing to pay to save?

2) How much do you print to justify the initial expense?

3) At what point will the initial cost of the machine essentially pay for itself in cost of ink savings?

4) Am I bright enough to figure all of this out?  Do I have the time to figure all of this out?

5) Maybe I should just call Doc Jams Printer Repair.

So they say there are 3 kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.  I’m here to truthfully tell you what to look for when pricing supplies for your office machines.  You do check the cost of supplies before purchasing your office machines, right?

The office machine industry standard for assistance in determining an apples to apples comparison in regards to ink/toner quantity is 5% coverage.  5% coverage is roughly equal to one letter size page of text.  Few people will ever actually print routinely at 5% coverage, most will print somewhere around that number.  Consider that most full page photographs are getting much closer to the 100% coverage for each ink/toner cartridge.  What does that mean?  It means that the small price difference of a few cents for each page you discovered when comparing inks/toners to each other is not closer to 20 times the difference.

Say what?!?

If toner #1 costs you $0.021 per page, and toner #2 costs you $0.026 per page you might not care.  Multiply that by 20 (5% = 100%/20) and you get a difference of  a dime.  No big deal right?  Until you print more than one page.  Then suddenly, the multiplier shows up.  Ten pages turn into a dollar.  100 pages turns into a few cups of joe.  A few thousand pages turns into a car payment.

The solution is simple.  Do your math before you buy an office machine, or have Doc Jams do the math for you.

Do you want to save money on printing?  Stop buying cheap printers.

The best way to save money printing is to not purchase a cheap printer. Cheap printers use expensive ink. When you purchase a printer, you purchase it once, and a cheap printer is great when you first purchase it. You barely paid more for that printer than you would spend on a night on the town. But those starter ink cartridges that were included with your cheap printer are soon empty, and now you have a problem. Your cheap printer uses some expensive ink. In fact, it may be cheaper to just buy a new machine altogether. Quite the green footprint you’d be leaving on the world with a reaction like that. How could the printer companies take advantage of you like that? Because you didn’t call Doc Jams Printer Repair for some advice, that’s why.

Printer ink and toner cartridges use a universally accepted rating of 5% coverage on a page to help compare apples to apples when it comes to cost per page of printing. A 5% coverage page is equal to a simple page of text. Not all printed pages use the same amount of ink, so this rating helps determine how much ink or toner use you can expect to receive from a given cartridge. A simple black ink cartridge for an ink jet printer may cost $40 and run 500 pages at 5% coverage. That’s $0.08 for a page of text, no photos, graphics, or fancy color! Let’s look at another laser cartridge rated at 12,000 pages that costs $170. That produces pages at just over $0.01. The initial cost of the first machine is less than $200. The second cartridge is used in a printer that costs $800. So the initial cost of the machine hurts once, but the expensive ink will make itself known every time you print. Lets take an example of 10,000 pages printed on both sample machines.  Cheap Inkjet A costs $800 to print 10,000 pages.  Wonderful Laser Printer B costs just over $141 to print those same 10,000 pages.

Consider that the next time you need to buy ink for the tenth time this month. Sometimes being green can save you money.