The True Cost of Printing

Roughly a century ago, as the story goes, a salesman named King Camp Gillette had two ideas—one good, one brilliant. The good idea was to sell a safety razor that used disposable blades, so you could replace a dull blade easily. The brilliant idea—which made Gillette rich—was to sell the razors at or below cost and make a high-margin profit on the blades.

This technique has been wholeheartedly embraced by printer vendors. And it's an important reason you need to consider far more than purchase price when shopping for a printer—or thinking about using your current printer for photos. There's no way to figure out a printer's true cost, but you can come up with a reasonable approximation.

The aforementioned marketing strategy is most obvious with inexpensive ink jets. With printers that sell for less than $100 (which some companies give away with computers) and ink cartridges that cost $30 or $40 a pop, you don't have to buy many cartridges before you've spent more for the ink than for the printer. Less obvious is that the same logic applies to lasers. If you spend $1,000 for the printer and $100 for each toner cartridge, you'll almost certainly spend lots more for the toner over the life of the printer.

As high print quality and speed have become more commonplace, attention has shifted to cost. Since November 2000, PC Magazine has been running a cost-per-page test for ink jet printers in our roundups. What's sometimes forgotten (even though we take care to point it out) is that there are still other factors to consider. What matters is the total cost of printing, which includes the printer's initial purchase price and the costs of ink or toner over the printer's lifetime, paper, other service items (like drum units for laser printers), and electricity (which some printers gobble up faster than others). And the calculation is much the same whether you're looking at one printer for your home or dozens for a corporate-wide purchase.

The most sophisticated cost analyses also look at factors like installation time. Some 15-minute savings in time for an employee making, say, $60,000 a year, can quickly add up in a large company. But such secondary costs are harder to quantify, so we'll largely ignore them here.

Make a Commitment

Before you can calculate a printer's cost, you need to know how many years you expect to keep the printer. This is usually three, four, or five years. If you don't have an official budget to buy a new printer every so many years, base your guess on how long you've kept printers in the past. We'll assume a three-year lifetime.

The next step is to estimate how many pages you'll print. This is easy if you expect to follow the same printing patterns as in the past. If you buy a case of 5,000 sheets every two months, the total in three years will be 90,000 sheets. If you print on several kinds of print media with different costs, such as photo paper, calculate the amounts of each kind separately.

Calculating the number of pages is harder if you expect to vary your output. If you're choosing a new printer in part for its photo-quality output—or thinking of using your current printer for photos—you can only guess how many photos you'll be printing, and on what types and sizes of paper: high-quality glossy, premium glossy, matte, 8- by 10-inch, 4- by 5-inch, and so on. Prices for these paper types vary considerably. Make your best guess for each size and type, then add 10 percent more to each to allow for reprints.

The Cost of Ink

Once you derive the total number of pages, you can calculate the cost of ink in one of two ways. (Right now, we'll assume you're looking at a monochrome printer.) If you know a printer's cost per page—provided by the manufacturer, perhaps, or taken from independent tests—you can multiply the cost per page by the total number of pages you expect to print. Alternatively, if you know how many pages to expect per cartridge, you can divide the total number of pages you plan to print by the number of pages per cartridge to get the number of cartridges you'll use. Then multiply that number by the cost per cartridge.

The calculation can be more involved with color. You can rely on a cost per page based on a presumed mix of output if you want to keep color calculations relatively simple. PC Magazine's cost-per-page results, for example, are based on a survey that asked readers about their printing output. The output pages we use for testing are designed to include the average page coverage for each ink color for several kinds of output media, so the result is a realistic average cost per page for a printer.

Surf to www.pcmag.com/printers. If we've put the printer you're considering through our rundown tests, you can multiply the cost per page we found by the number of pages you plan to print. Also look at the total cost of ink for that printer, which reflects the average for the output of users surveyed. Keep in mind that your usage patterns may vary widely.

If you don't have an overall cost-per-page number or you don't want to depend on an average that may not apply to you, you can calculate the cost for color pages separately from monochrome pages and then add the two. Estimate the percentages of the pages you plan to print in color and in monochrome. Then use the appropriate cost per page for each.

Alternatively, use the appropriate number of pages per cartridge for each and the appropriate cost per cartridge. If the printer uses separate cartridges for each color ink, you'll usually find that the vendor claims the same number of pages for each cartridge, so you can combine the cost of all three color cartridges. Note that when you're calculating costs for monochrome cartridges, you should multiply the cost per page by the total planned page output, because color pages also use black ink. More important, keep in mind that either of these calculations will give you only a rough approximation of ink costs, because different images use different amounts of ink. Printing an 8- by 10-inch photo, for example, uses more ink than printing a text page with a small color graph. Our chart shows one potential home-use scenario in which a $50 ink jet ends up costing $550 more than a $250 printer over three years.

If you're interested in photos specifically, you may want to adjust your estimate. For example, if a manufacturer bases its cost per color page on 20 percent coverage—5 percent of each color—and you plan to print mostly 8- by 10-inch photos, you should multiply the cost per page by 7.5 to 10 to get a rough estimate for photos. The maximum coverage for photos is 400 percent—100 percent for each color including black. Because most colors are created from a mix of two or three ink colors, an edge-to-edge photo will always have more than 100 percent coverage.

Paper and Extras

If you never use anything but plain paper, you can pretty much ignore the cost of paper; it will be the same for any printer you're looking at. If you use photo paper, transparencies, or other media that vary in cost from printer to printer, however, look up the cost for each type, multiply it by the number of pages you've estimated for that medium, and add that cost to your total. Also, make sure you include service items. If you have to replace an imaging drum on your laser printer every 25,000 pages and you expect to print a total of 90,000 pages, over the printer's lifetime you'll need to replace the drum three times.

Putting It All Together

At this point you should have the total costs for the printer plus any options, plus the cost of ink, paper, and service items. If you're concerned only with additional costs for printing photos, leave out any items you've already 0paid for or will pay for anyway. And instead of just comparing one printer's total cost against another's, compare it against the cost of other options, like photo-printing kiosks and online photo-printing services, just to make sure the DIY method will save money.

Here are some general caveats. First, don't assume that you can use less expensive supplies from another manufacturer. Companies often work hard to lock you into buying their cartridges. We recently reviewed two nearly identical multifunction printers, both built by Lexmark: the and the . When we put a Lexmark cartridge in the Dell unit, the print monitor software wouldn't recognize it as a valid cartridge.

Also, printer manufacturers work hard to match their ink and paper to produce long-lasting output. Printer ink will produce different colors on different papers. Using third-party ink refill kits and paper is probably okay for text or business graphs, but they can make a big difference for photos. The moral: Test third-party supplies and make sure they work well. And be aware that even when the colors are acceptable with third-party products, they will often fade faster—so you'll have to reprint your photos more often.

Just like disposable razors, cheap printers aren't always a bargain. Calculate the long-term price before you buy to keep costs down and productivity up.