Most people who use a computer at home will need a printer, and most of them opt for an inkjet printer because they tend to be cheaper to buy than laser printers.  But sometimes what's cheapest up front can work out more expensive in the long run.  This hub will compare the cost of running an inkjet printer with that of running a laserjet, and will help you decide which option is best for you based on cost and what you actually want from your printer.

The first question to ask yourself is "Do I want to print in colour?" I must be one of the rare people who doesn't. I've got a decade-old monochrome laser printer (a Hewlett Packard LaserJet 6L in case you were wondering) and for 99% of the time, it suits my needs perfectly.  So what if it will only let me feed in one page at a time?  Most of my documents are only a few pages long.  (Once it was happy to deal with multiple pages, but now they get stuck.)  Two things it does deliver on are (a) print quality, and (b) ease of use. I only need to change the toner once every six months or so and doing so is easy peasy, with no danger of ruining my clothes with ink. On the very few occasions when I do need to print in colour (e.g. when I've taken some photos), I can copy the files onto a flash memory card or stick, go down to my local print shop or branch of Boots, and have them printed there.

What if you print in colour on a regular basis, and would find multiple trips to the print shop to be an inconvenience? Obviously a colour printer is the option for you. But which should it be: laser or inkjet?

I visited amazon.co.uk and did a comparison. Before I go any further, I should apologise to readers from America and other countries outside the UK, because I've made this hub shamelessly anglocentric in its approach. So all prices, part numbers and URLs pertain to the UK or at any rate region 2, i.e. Europe. But even if you're not from the UK, you'll hopefully be able to adapt my approach and do your own comparisons.

While I was on Amazon. I chose two printers: the Dell 1320CN Network Colour Laser Printer (which retails for £104.98 on Amazon at the time of writing), and the HP Deskjet 6940 Color inkjet printer (which costs £109.99). Both printers are almost exactly the same price and sell very well, and have high customer ratings (both around 4.5 stars). Plus there's a high number of reviews for both, so you get a more accurate picture of how good the printer actually is!

So far, so good. But what about the running costs? Two more factors to consider are how much do the toner cartridges cost in the first place, and how many pages on average do they print?

For the HP Deskjet 6940, it was easy to find toner cartridges on Amazon itself.  You can buy a pack of two black cartridges and a pack of two tri-colour cartridges for £45.02.  I couldn't find any toner cartridges for the Dell printer on Amazon, so I went to Dell's own site (click here).  It turns out you need three separate toners for colour printing (cyan, magenta and yellow); the high capacity versions of each cost £68.75.  A high capacity black toner is £51.75.  As you can see from the table, if you go by initial costs alone, the inkjet works out a lot cheaper!  (The low capacity versions aren't worth bothering with because they do half the number of pages but cost far more than half as much.)

There is however another factor to consider, namely how many pages can you reasonably expect to print for each cartridge?  The Dell website helpfully tells you that the high capacity toners can print an average of 2,000 sheets.  Despite extensive searching on the Internet, I couldn't find the same information for the HP Deskjet cartridges.  However I have used other makes of colour inkjet in places I've worked at, and no way are they capable of printing 2,000 sheets.  I would estimate that 500 sheets is more realistic.

So to make the comparison fairer, it would be useful to work out total running costs for printing the first 2,000 sheets. The second table does just that. As you can see, this evens things up quite a bit although the inkjet is still cheaper by about £70.00. At this point, you'll probably want to factor other things into your decision like resolution (I was surprised to find that the Deskjet printer had a far higher resolution than the Dell printer) printing speed and monthly duty cycle. It's on these last two factors that a laser printer will win hands down; the Dell has a MDC of 35,000 while the Deskjet's is 5,000! (In case you were wondering, the MDC is the number of pages per month that a printer can reasonably be expected to print without dying on you.)

So there you have it. I enjoyed doing the research for this hub, but in doing it I've finally realised just how complicated it is to make an informed decision when buying a printer! In the end, it's not just the cost that will determine your choice, but the way in which you plan to use the printer as well.

© M. Ibbotson October 2009