Starting point is that outsourcing is definitely the cheapest option. I use a pro cannon printer, even second hand I am never going to recoup the money on it compared to going to a lab for prints. Why do I have it - because I can print, look at the result and change the picture in real time.
So questions why does your wife want a printer, is it the same as mine? In which case you’re right you need a printer. If it’s different - she doesn’t like relying on another group member - then outsource it to the local stationary store. It’ll still be cheaper and she won’t have the feeling of not supporting the group.
If you have to get a printer, you’re going to balance few things. Printheads these days tend to run self cleans every few days so they last longer - but suck ink even if you’re not printing much. Ink cartridges have a limited life span, usually a couple of years so even when not used much - she might complain if yellow prints as green as one of my older printers did. Laser printers are not immune either, the powder compacts over time, plus the cartridges are a lot bigger so still potential for waste.
But fundamentally, if you’re printing only a few colour sheets a year, likely the most cost effective is to buy the cheapest colour inkjet you can - c$40. When it dies replace it. It’ll probably last longer than you think it will. Even if you replace it every year it’ll still be cheaper than buying a laser printer (even presuming it never breaks, or needs new toner) over a five year stretch.
That isn’t the best for the planet, so make sure you do everything you can to help it last, then recycle it when it does finally start dreaming of electric sheep.
My experience was better than yours. Back when I was using ink-jet (an HP DeskJet 842c), it worked reliably for many years. I got rid of it because I wanted to (and because HP stopped shipping drivers for macOS, and the Gutenprint drivers didn’t work as well).
HP’s mechanism (at least then - I don’t know about now) combines the print head with the ink cartridge. So if you do get clogged heads, you can just replace the cartridge. It doesn’t require more elaborate cleaning/maintenance/repair procedures.
My main reason for going laser afterward was (and still is):
Speed. The ink-jet printer, at its fastest, could print 2-3 pages per minute. My first laser printer could do 17 ppm (single-sided) and my current one does 25.
Duplexing. With the ink-jet, I need to manually re-insert the pages in order to print on the other side. My laser printers all include duplexers.
No more soggy paper. With ink-jet, a full page of graphics would end up producing distinctly wet pages that warp and don’t lie flat after drying. Laser printers don’t suffer from this.
Toner doesn’t bleed when it gets wet. Most ink-jet printers use ink that will bleed if the paper gets wet after printing.
I initially thought the laser printer would cost less to operate as well, but that’s only partially true.
When I was using ink-jet, a black cartridge cost about $30 and a color cartridge cost about $35 (today, those the prices are about double that for genuine HP ink). Each would last for about 500 pages, for an overall cost of about 6 cents per black page and 13 cents per color page.
With the laser printer I’m using today, a set of four genuine Brother cartridges (currently) costs $340. The black toner lasts for about 3000 pages and color lasts for about 2300 pages, for an overall cost of about 3 cents per black page (cheaper than ink-jet) and 15 cents per color page (more expensive than ink-jet).
Of course, you need to do the math for your own printer’s ink/toner, since prices can vary dramatically across brands/models.
Another vote for inexpensive (purchase price) color laser printers. I’ve used a couple of Brother models over the last 15 years or so, both home and at work, and have only two gripes: the four toner cartridges are pretty pricey, but for the volume you’re talking about, they’ll last for years, and Brother sets the low toner warning with far too much toner left — but that doesn’t prevent printing, and there are workarounds.
OCD note: the lowest-end Brother color printer is actually an LED printer, rather than a laser, but the print quality is identical, to my eyes at least — and the printing process is very similar to laser printing.
She wants one because she wants one…and while she realizes intellectually the price winner of using somebody else who already has one…her thought is that we can afford it so she wants one…and I’m smart enough not to argue with woman logic…or man logic in similar but reverse cases. That’s one reason we celebrated our 45th last month.
The low-toner warning is your notification to go buy a replacement cartridge. It doesn’t prevent printing. Later on, you will eventually get a “toner empty” alert, which does prevent printing. That’s when you should install the replacement cartridge (that you should have already purchased after seeing the low-toner warning).
LED and laser printers use the same general design. A photosensitive drum is electrically charged. Light striking the drum dissipates the charge. Powdered toner is also electrically charged and is brought near the drum. Since like-charges repel, the toner is repelled from the charged parts of the drum (where the light didn’t strike) and sticks to the uncharged parts (where the light did strike). Then the drum is pressed against the paper, to transfer the toner to it and is then pressed against a hot roller (the fuser) to melt the toner into the paper.
The difference between laser and LED printers is how the light gets to the drum. With a laser printer, there is a laser that shines through a system of optics (beam-splitters, rotating mirrors and other components) to illuminate the drum. With an LED printer, a row of small LEDs is positioned next to each drum, so its light can focus on it.
The primary advantage of a laser is that you can get much higher resolution. Laser printers sporting 2400 dots per inch can be purchased. Some printers can even vary the size of each dot (what HP calls “Resolution Enhancement Technology” or “RET”) by controlling the intensity and focus of the laser.
The primary advantage of an LED printer is lower cost. A strip of 5100 LEDs (8.5 inches at 600 dpi) can be manufactured at a pretty low cost and no complicated optics are required to deliver its image to the drum. The downside is that you can’t get very high resolutions. I’ve never seen an LED printer with 1200 or 2400 horizontal dpi (I have seen 2400 vertical DPI, which can be implemented by rotating the drum more slowly). I assume its because an LED strip at that resolution (10,200 or 20,400 LEDs in an 8.5" strip) either can’t be made, or would cost so much that laser is more economical.
Overall, I don’t think laser-vs-LED matters all that much. For those resolutions where you have a choice (e.g. 300- and 600-dpi), they look the same. For higher resolutions, then you don’t have a choice - only laser supports them.
I have a Brother colour laser and am happy with it other than the cost of replacement toner. This particular model I saw reviewed after I bought it, and they described the toner cost as too high. Some of the reviews calculate a toner cost. It seems that often the more expensive printers have lower toner cost.
A good summary. However, on at least some Brother printers, there’s a way to print even when the “toner empty” message is showing and the printer refuses to print. I’ve done that on my Brother HL-L8350CDW printer and been able to print hundreds of pages afterwards before colors start to look wrong.
“Toner empty” doesn’t mean there is no toner, but that the machine has decided that there may be no toner. Perhaps it uses page counts or some other proxy for a sensor that actually measures how much toner is in the cartridge.
Search the internet or YouTube for reset brother TN-NNN toner cartridge where “TN-NNN” is the model of toner cartridge your printer uses", or reset toner cartridge ABC DEF where “ABC DEF” are the brand and model of your printer. The two methods I’ve used successfully (for different cartridges) involve putting black electrical tape over a “window” on the cartridge and moving a mechanical cog on a gear on the cartridge.
This isn’t too surprising. For consumer printers, a toner cartridge is not just a box of toner powder.
They typically include various mechanical parts and sensors. For some printers, they also include the drum (Brother’s printers use separate drum and toner devices, which are connected to each other during installation). More expensive printers usually have larger cartridges, so there is a larger toner-to-mechanism ratio.
This is also why refilling toner can be so cheap - because you’re re-using all of the other parts in the cartridge, which typically last a lot longer than one cartridge worth of printing.
They could design printers where the toner cartridge is just a box of toner powder. Some enterprise-class printers/copiers actually do this. But it means that the other parts of the toner mechanism (rollers, gears, drums, etc.) all end up needing replacement on various schedules. If you’re a business with a paid-up on-site maintenance contract (or an IT department with qualified people), this isn’t too big a deal, but it can be overwhelming for a small-office/home user.
Yep, my wife uses this approach and at least one of the two nearby print ships accepts online submission. As Simon noted, the cost is minimal and the service quick. Our two decade+ HP LaserJet 1200 ( B&W ) still runs ( although I disassembled it once to lubricate a squealing internal part ), so enough said there.
There’s probably no one-size-fits-all answer to the situation. When my kids were in grammar and high school I was occasionally running out of paper and ink to support their projects. Now that they have moved out my spare ink cartridges (I always keep a spare. Maybe I shouldn’t?) expire before I get a chance to install them. My combo-printer is used as a scanner more than it prints (and who uses fax those days anyway?).
Some things to ponder about:
Some printer models support various size cartridges. Get the smaller cartridges to minimize the loss when they expire.
Print at a print shop (or that lady). If it’s so rare that you print you may as well survive without your color printer and pay by the page (and through your nose…) at a print shop when needed.
Save a tree. Don’t print. Send an e-flyer instead!
Don’t get a color laser. It costs more. The cartridges cost more and age just as fast. You need it if you print massive amounts and want extra fast printing.
Some printers use a single cartridge for all three colors. Some use three cartridges one for each color (and all use a separate cartridge for black). Some use containers that you refill (cost-effective if you print a lot). The benefit of separate cartridges is that if you run out of one color you don’t need to replace all three. Check the price of cartridges before you decide which option to pick. Considering your low use your cartridges are likely to expire prior to running out of ink, so buy the cheaper option.
This is such a timely posting! Having lived through dot-matrix (Epson FX-80; £500!), HP 550 Inkjet (a revelation at the time; £500!), several Epson inkjets, a discarded Apple LaserWriter II which I fixed for free (what a brilliant printer, but very heavy and big), I finally settled on Canon inkjets and had two over many years. Without a doubt, inkjets provide the best quality photo prints and the Epsons were better quality than the Canons but the Epsons’ heads clogged regularly and the cleaning routines wasted lots of very expensive ink. The Canon’s were much better in this respect, as they seemed to clean their heads automatically and frequently. This could be frustrating when they would click and whirr for about ten minutes before printing the first page but the software was good and stable. Eventually, I decided to buy another monochrome laser – a Brother HL-5250DN. It gets used for 90% of all jobs and what a fantastic workhorse it has been! It is just nearing its first drum replacement. It has never missed a beat through numerous MacOS upgrades. So when I recently decided to buy a colour (UK spelling!) laser, I decided to stick with Brother, as I am very brand loyal and also bought the Brother HL-L3270 CDW. I have had it a few days now and offer the following observations:
It works very well. I am very pleased with the results. I have treated myself to some glossy (laser!!!) photo paper and the results are pretty good, though not up to Epson inkjet standards. However, my attitude is that for the few photos I need to be printed, I will have them done by a proper lab. That way they won’t fade as badly, they aren’t expensive and you can pay for an awful lot of prints for the cost of the printer, ink and papers.
It is big, but not much bigger than the monochrome laser. It was very easy to set up and works great from iOS devices too. I would not recommend installing the firmware update that will be offered. The forums suggest that this means it will only work with Brother brand toner and may even insist that you change all four cartridges when just one is empty. I haven’t had a chance to test this yet – can anybody on here confirm?
Finally, when printing double-sided (duplex), it is much slower than advertised. My best guess is that the internal RAM is not big enough to hold two pages worth of data, so the computer needs to spool each side separately.
Otherwise, I am very satisfied so far.
Well, yes, they cost more. But the cost for the printer is almost irrelevant compared to the cost of supplies, unless you really don’t print much of anything.
As for the toner cartridges, the cost is comparable to ink-jet. See my previous message on the subject. For black pages, they cost less per page. For color, they cost more. But the color cartridges aren’t used when you’re printing black pages. Yes, there is a higher up-front cost, but you get many times more pages from a toner cartridge than a typical ink cartridge.
As for “age just as fast”, I don’t know what you mean. Toner lasts a long time unless you’re operating in a very humid environment. I’ve never heard of toner going bad in the printer.
And even old “expired” toner sitting on your shelf will probably be just fine if it remains in its original packaging (typically sealed in anti-static light-proof bags).
What speeds are you observing? The spec sheet says 25 ppm single-sided or 4ppm (8 sides per minute) when using the duplexer. I haven’t timed mine, but the duplexing speed sounds about right in my experience.
I’m sure the delay is simply the speed of the transport mechanism itself, since single-sided printing is much faster. If the memory was the bottleneck, single-sided printing would also slow down.
It’s not true, toner doesn’t age like ink and doesn’t have problems comparable to print head clogging. I don’t know how the return on investment math works out for most people.
I wanted to print a double-sided sheet with colour images, generated by Pages. When I subsequently saved it as a pdf, I was surprised to find that it was 23 MB and I suspect this was caused by Pages saving the full-sized images. I was able to save a reduced size version, which was 1.5MB.
I needed twenty copies of the document. Printing the Pages file, resulted in it downloading page 1, printing that, then downloading page 2 and printing that. Then it downloaded page 1 again, printed that, then downloaded page 2 and printed that etc.
When I printed the smaller pdf, it behaved much more how I expected, rattling them off at the advertised speed.
Unfortunately, small desktop printers are not typically “mopier” devices. Mopier is an HP term for “Multiple Original Copier”, and describes a mode where your computer transmits one copy of your document, and the printer uses its own firmware to print multiple copies (as requested) of that document.
You tend to not find mopier support on small printers because it requires the printer to have a lot of internal storage (RAM, SSD or even a hard drive) and a more advanced processor. It’s a common feature on large office/enterprise printers.
Without this feature (and compatible device drivers), your computer needs to retransmit the document for each copy you print. If it’s a big/complicated document, this can consume a lot of CPU and network resources. Which, I believe, is what you’re seeing.
Something else to keep in mind. The OP made it clear that the color printer will be primarily used for a newsletter for a local ladies club. We are not talking about the annual September fashion issues of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar or Marie Claire. Will the extra costs associated with an ink jet make that big a difference to the audience over time?
True, and if that’s the primary use, it changes the answer a little.
If it’s truly informal - like handouts at an event - then do whatever you like.
If you’re going to be mailing them, then this goes against ink-jet, because stuff can get wet in the mail and you don’t want the ink to run.
There’s also the time spent on the printing. If you’re going to print a small amount, ink-jet may be fine. If you’re going to print a few dozen copies, the extra speed of a laser will be welcome.
If you’re going to print a few hundred copies, I suggest contacting a local print shop (and they can do all kinds of other nice things for a newsletter, like stapling/binding and using higher quality paper). Talk with them to see what format they require (maybe you can just send them a PDF with the content) and see what it will cost (some places will give non-profit groups a discount).
Thanks all…OP here…and I’ve got one of these on order. Costs more than the inkjet but I would forever be cleaning heads and replacin* dried up ink cartridges.
I get what several Sid about using a printing service or continuing to get her friend to do the color printouts…but neither of those would make her happy…and with the far larger mounts I spend on computer stuff and photography stuff trying to convince her it isn’t economically efficient isn’t worth the fort plus…she’s my bride and wants one…and we can afford it. I will keep my Brother 5370DW for non color work and might try the glossy paper for a photo or two although I’m sure an inkjet photo print is better. But they still fade over time so using a commercial printing service and archival inks makes sense…and the only images I would print would be for me to hang on the wall and there isn’t much wall space left in our house anyway.