Buying The Right Printer

(CBS)  I remember when school supplies meant going out for paper, pens, pencils and those handy plastic pockets you put in three ring binders. Today we're equipping our school kids with PCs, printers, cell phones and iPods.

I'm not sure that iPods are exactly required school supplies but having access to a PC and a printer is, for most kids, bordering on a necessity.

When it comes to printers and multifunction devices, you have a lot of choices, including some for as little as $50. But when shopping for printers don't just pay attention to the purchase price – also find out what it will cost to use the printer. When comparing prices, you should look at printers from all manufacturers including Lexmark, Canon, Epson, Brother and Hewlett Packard but even within the same company, you'll find a big variation on the cost of use and it's not uncommon for printers that are cheaper to buy actually cost more to use.

I recently had a chance to try out two Hewlett Packard multi-function devices that serve as a printer as well as a scanner and copier. The DeskJet F380, which does a reasonably good job on all three functions, costs only $79 to buy, but a black ink cartridge (the ink people use the most) costs $15 and yields approximately 150 pages at a cost 10 cents per page. But if you were to spend $199 for HP's soon-to-be-released higher end Photosmart C5180 multi-function device (MFD), you would not only get a faster and better printer, scanner and copier and but one that was substantially cheaper to use. Its black ink cartridges cost $18 but yield 480 pages at a cost of about 3.7 cents a page.

So which device is cheaper? Well, it depends on how much you use it. If you were only planning on printing one page a day you might be better off with the cheaper model, but if you were to print 10 black and white pages a day, you'd spend a whopping $365 a year to feed black ink to your cheaper printer compared to $137 for the more expensive printer. In other words, after a year's worth of use, that $79 printer would cost you $444 compared to $350 for the "more expensive" printer. I'm not going to try to compare the cost of printing color pages because they vary dramatically, but one big advantage to the more expensive C5180 is that it uses five individual color cartridges (plus a black cartridge) instead of the tri-color cartridges used on less expensive printers. So if you run out of one color, you just spend $10 to replace it instead of having to spend $20 to $30 for a tri-color cartridge. In the long run, individual with cartridges you'll pay a lot less for your color ink.

You can get even more dramatic results if you buy a laser printer. Again, using Hewlett Packard as an example, the company's $129.99 LaserJet 1018 personal laser printer yields 2000 copies on a $70 cartridge for about 3.5 cents a page. But if you were to spend $299 on the company's more business oriented LaserJet 1320, you'd wind up spending only about 2.2 cents for each document you print which means that the $300 laser printer would cost you less to use in a single year than the $79 ink jet.

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