Printers
I’ve had a couple of inkjets in the past. But we don’t print much and I reckon more ink was used cleaning the print heads than ended up on the paper. That’s an expensive way to run a printer given the ridiculous cost of inkjet toner. And I swear a whole load of ink just evaporated.
Colour laser printers on the other hand are dramatically cheaper than they used to be. And laser printer ink doesn’t evaporate on account of it not being a liquid 
One bit of research later and I’d bought a Xerox 6180 complete with £100 rebate. The rebate took a few emails / calls to get put through (the cynic in me says they make it deliberately difficult to minimise the number of people who actually collect) but it meant I ended up with a colour laser printer for, IIRC, £160. Utter bargain. It’s lasted yonks. So long in fact I can’t quite remember when I bought it. But it was several years ago.
Ink
Inkjet ink. Costs as much as single malt whisky. Apparently. I can’t be ared to research it so I’ll tell you about a local photographer who has a massive colour inkjet printer (about three grand’s-worth) which takes similarly massive ink cartridges … which cost over a grand to refill. And they’re *cheap because of the volume - ink for his A3 colour printer is about double the cost by volume.
Which brings me on to my next point.
Laser printer toner (or at least the cartridges it comes in) is also stupidly expensive. To elaborate, the Xerox I have requires four new toner cartridges. Actually it only requires one (black) but all the others are also running low and need replacing soon according to the printer.
Each cartridge retails for something like £80 each (bizarrely some colours are significantly cheaper than others) for the low capacity cartridge (around 3,000 pages-worth). I also found some high capacity cartridges (6,000 pages each) for £100-150 each. Let’s say a minimum of £320 for four new cartridges then.
That’s a lot of money to keep a printer several years old going. So that calls for a bit of research.
Hmmm…
The best all-round printer for my needs (actually way more than my needs but I want high quality more than anything else) seems to be an HP M553n. It’s an improvement for me because it:
- supports AirPrint out of the box (finally meaning we can print from the gaggle of iPads we have)
- comes with cartridges for ~5,000 pages
- is about twice the speed of the Xerox
So, how much? Under £320.
Right. So I can keep old tech going or buy something newer, faster, better for the same. Easy choice. But:
- #wtf
- Now I have to throw away a perfectly reasonable printer with plenty of life (if not toner) left in it … not exactly green
The weird thing is that replacement cartridges for this new printer cost more (£523) than the printer itself. How has that happened? Why aren’t there people buying whole printers, asset stripping the cartridges, then re-selling them for a profit.
So … in a decade or so I guess I’ll be researching new printers again.
Anyone fancy a barely used Xerox laser printer?