Small business forum: Color Laser versus Inkjet printing

I have found that laser is more expensive to buy and the ink is more expensive. but the yield is much greater. So if it cost twice as much to purchace and the ink costs twice as much. But the yeild is 10 times what ink jet is??? It actually costs less per print.
Case in point.

4 cartridges @ $70.00 each/2500 =.112
1 Drum for $100 good for 40,000 Prints =.025
1 Deveolper$160 good for 40,000 Prints =.004
The cost of the printer $ 1000 good
for 200,000 Prints, I have color printers
that have over 200,000 prints and still =.005
going
Laser Total 11.5 cents per

Just the cost of the ink for inkjet is more than
3 times what laser costs.
2 cartdridges @ 35 each $70.00 / 250 = .28 per page

And the quality of the print is better with laser.
And I have never had a laser ink cartridge dry up on me, Because the ink is already a dry toner.

That is just 15 years of experience that I have
had with printers.

I have been using a colour laserjet from Hewlett Packard for about 18 months, and it is wonderful. I can only say though, do some research before buying new cartridges. I can jump in the car and go 20 miles to spend 100 per colour cartridge, or I can source about 300 miles away for 65 per cartridge, and just have to wait a couple of days for delivery. I don't know if there's the same cort differences in the US but shop around, you could save a fortune.

I have printed photos on color lasers by HP and they don't compare to inkjet. They have a strange unatural look to them. Using photo paper doesn't help. Toner will not show up as glossy on glossy paper. It still has that strange matt texture to it.
There are some color lasers that may be ok for photos. They are ones made by Okidata and Xerox (tektronix) that use either solid wax inks or color toner that I believe is waxed based. These have a much more vibrant and glossy texture that stands off the paper even more than inkjet, but these printers are costly to run and, since I have had to work on them often, problematic! If you just want color business documents or web pages, go with a cheap color laser. If you want good photo quality buy a good color inkjet and use a black and white laser for high speed documents. Or you can do like I do and buy cheap aftermarket ink carts for your inkjet and you will have good photo quality without the high per page cost. It won't be fast though.

People wonder why I have been hanging on to my 15 year old Okidata OL-400e laser printer. Since toner is $10 and a new photosensitive roller is $95 I can get this old baby back in action for $105! That compares better than 2 sets of cartriges for my now given away DeskJet 3420. I'm sorry, but 5ml Ink Cartriges are not prime material for printing. 400 pages later and you will be wishing you had spent money on a laser printer! It's a good thing I am getting a 5150 Deskjet. 17 ml ink cartriges are much better for printing lots of stuff. Besides, who needs 4800 dpi when you are printing a bunch of letters? 300 dpi seems to do just as well...

I completely agree. Use a Laser for all B & W printing. I even use an ink jet to print partial color documents (letterheads etc.) and feed them back for the text whenever possible. You can lower your average printing cost this way.

I'm in the process of evaluating color lasers now (which brought me to this discussion). The balancing act seems to be around speed vs quality for a price. You can get good (arguably photo quality) but it will be slow and/or expensive. Getting fast, high quality color for under 10 cents a page seems to be the trick. Still much cheaper than ink. Xerox may be on to something here.

This is a very fast changing part of the market so it pays, as it often does with technology, to procrastinate a decision. In the time I've been eyeballing this two new good models have come out.

So if you can wait - wait! But whatever you do make sure you do the math. Lasers are long-term investments while inkjets are really just disposable printers.

I currently use several printers: Brother HL1440 in my office & at home (very reliable and cheap to operate); 2 canon ink jets (S750 & S530D) as well as (sending jobs to) an HP 4050. They all have their uses but the ink jets are going. Last year I was looking but it was unclear to me that color lasers had enough of an advantage (for ~$1000 or so) but now it's clear that there are plenty of reasons to have a laser color at a reasonable price. But I'll still keep an ink jet just for photo printing. I've seen reviews of ~$60 printers that do better than fair printing photos. And I'll keep my HL1440 to print standard email, docs. etc.

I wish to sell my lazer jet 1200 series to buy a color printer. Any interested? I would like 200 for it. It retails for $500

The speed at which you can print with a color laser, as well as the longevity of the color toner vs. inkjet cartridges, makes having a color laser a real treat, even for the casual user like me. While you will pay a bit more for good color laser paper (which I recommend), the only downside that I have found aside from the space that is required for these printers (although the size does seem to be decreasing somewhat) is the lack of good photo printing vs. a photo-enabled inkjet. I have only found a couple companies that make laser photo paper (8.5 x 11 only, I might add) , but even using those specialty papers doesn't rival the crispness that you get from an inkjet. At least, that has been my experience with the Brother laser printer that I have.

If anyone knows of a way to yield better photo-quality pictures out of a color laser, I would appreciate hearing about that as well. Thanks.

The reason I say that is that I was in the final stages of burnout trying to get decent output from various Lexmark inkjets. The problem was not the quality when new - it was that after the printer sat for a bit, the nozzles would clog or gum up, the color balance would drift, things came out pink, when one ink ran dry the whole cartridge was landfill, etc. My son (now 12) wanted to throw the thing out because every time he had a report due, there was a half hour wasted fiddling trying to get the printer back in shape. Enough!

I bought an HP color laser. Cost about $450 with rebate. Hooked it to a cheap ethernet print server and hung it on the network. No more fiddling. No more print banding. No more weird colors. No more waiting forever. No more worrying about paper quality. No more frustration over color balance, saturation, or print quality. No more half hours spent fiddling trying to clean print heads. The whole house can use it, it's fast, reliable, and desk space returns. Who cares what it costs per page - my time is way more valuable than any materials costs, and so is my happiness and peace of mind. We do draft printouts on black and white lasers until it all looks good - pagination, page location of graphics, fonts, spelling, etc. and then print the color pages on the color laser.

Anyone want to buy a whole slew of inkjets cheap?

And no, I don't work for HP or anyone else, for that matter - I'm retired.

I live in a dry climate that is murder on inkjets. If you don't use them most every day, the ink tends to dry up in the jets. Ink carts were driving me crazy. I would only print color once a week, so the black might work from a good inkjet, but the color would plug up.

I put out the initial cost for the Oki and have not been unhappy. You have to shop around for the toner to save a few dollars, and it is frustrating when one color runs out and the machine will not print anything before you replace that color. But, this LED prints 12 pages of color per minute and even more in B&W. They never smear and back side printing works very well. The paper is cheaper for laser than inkjet but you cannot get a true photo like print with the laser/LED.

We use the Oki as our main printer for a small church. We hardly use the photocopier anymore. It can handle the high volume that an inkjet would fall apart under. I would hate to have to go back to depending on an inkjet.

I would say it depends on your printing needs. If you are in an office you are going to be mainly printing on standard 8 1/2x 11 and legal sized paper. If you need something in color it's most likely going to be for a presentation on the same paper sizes.

InkJet printers make it much easier to change to custom paper sizes and thickneses. Most are going to have the top feed design which limits bending the paper allowing for greater thicknesses. Also most of the Epson Photo printers have support for the rolled paper allowing for continuous printing and some have built in cutters.

How often do you print?
That $39 in cartridges is great but what happens when you print very little. Those cartridges are going to dry up. Laser would be better in this situation.


I could go on and on weighing both inkjet and laser but it comes down to whatever fits your needs.

It seem that Inkjet wins the battle for home photo printing but do you think a color laser printer would give good result for printing graphics and photos on labels and such? I am a photographer and I only use my home color printer to print CD labels for my clients and the occasional promotional item for myself. I have had enough with trying to get rid of lines from my second 1 year old ink printer. The problem is that I do not print colors very often so the cartridges dry out or clogs and no number of head cleaning and alignements will correct the quality of the image anymore. I also never print photographs at home (I use a lab for that). Image quality is king but not on photo paper anyway. Should I get a laser printer next or do you still recommand an inkjet?

They both coast alot but if want a cartridge thats going to last you a year or more color lazer otherwize i would get the inkjet i have a inkjet it works good but i have to by about 5 a year.

Dunno, but I do know that some Gameshark codes I printed with my Oki yeeeeaaaars ago are still perfectly readable!

I am looking at the 2550 L series and the 1200 d ink jet.. I wish to get a printer that is color and cost effective in regard to replacing the cartridges. Which way do I go? Where do you go to replace the cartridges? thanks

also about how many pages are you able to print for a full page color flyer before you replace the cartridges?