most economical colour laser printer?

Hi,

Please recommend me a colour laser printer with best economical printing per page especially when it comes to buying replacement cartridge?

Regards

Omer

It's not just the price of the toners you want to be looking at. A lot of colour printers have other consumables such as drums and transfer kits etc.

I recently bough a dell 1320, it takes compatible toners which cost next to nothing off ebay and it doesn't take any other consumables. You can pick up a set of toners for £15 which will do 1000 copies. Oh yes, and it's a network printer as well.

Much depends on the volume you're doing but a Xerox printer with Page Pack is an excellent option - it covers toners, maintenance kits, engineer callouts and has different usage bands. It even covers a replacement printer if you do so many prints it becomes beyond being able to be repaired.

As Jonathan says, the other consumables can mount up fast and get quietly ignored in magazine running cost reviews as well as online page cost comparisons. For example, Kyocera are low cost per page until the maintenance kit invoice hits your wallet.

Hi Omer,

Having been in the printer/copier industry with Canon and Ricoh in a past life i too carriede out many print audits.

It depends on what sort of printing you are doing. It is very difficult to work out the cheapest cost per page on a printer, it depends what coverage you are printing. All the printer / copier Companies use a system of average percentage coverage per page to give you a cost of printing, the industry standard is 6% coverage at a set price. ( you can see how much this looks like by folding an A4 sheet in half 4 times) This price these days is around 5p for colour and 0.5p mono. Now if you are printing 100% coverage your true cost per page is NOT 5p per page remember this price is for 6% it is more like 20p per page!

If you are printing with lots of coverage on a page you would be better using a ' copier' (MFD) rather than a desktop printer with a SHORT TERM agreed cost per page service contract that includes ALL toner and parts. If you would like some more info send me a PM and I would be happy to help failing that get in touch with Chas Jordan  a 4N member.

Hope this helps 

This depends so much on the actual volume you really print. Please tell us more.

One interesting move in the market: Inkjet manufacturers have now introduced more workgroup or office printers. Examples are the Epson Workforce series or HP OfficeJet 8100. Print costs per page are claimed to be substantially lower than consumer inkjets. They might even beat colour lasers.

Worth a look, I haven't yet got round to look into the finer details.

Hi, Thanks for contribution everyone, I am looking to do more of mono printing then colour, initially it wont be much printing but as client base grows would be looking a reliable colour printer.

Regards

Hi Omer

As Michael mentioned above, and from what you are saying about print capacity then it might be worth looking at the Epson WP-4525 DNF (print, copy, scan, fax).

Epson T7031 Black cartridge 1200 pages  Epson T7021 Black 2400 pages Epson T7011 3400 pages

Colour cartridges range in print capacity 800 pages, 2000 pages, 3,400 pages. Print capacity based on manufacturers information.

http://www.epson.co.uk/Store/Printers-and-All-in-Ones/Epson-WorkForce-Pro-WP-4525-DNF/Overview

I recommend a Dell 3110 - they're suitabel for mid-volume printing and while the toners are very expensive, we've used ours to print minimum 100 double sided sheets minimum per day and never had to change the toner cartridges in 3 years.

High Capacity Toner cartridges for the Dell 3110cn have a print capacity of 8,000 pages per toner. A pack of 4 toners would cost around the £600 mark inc VAT.

Hi Omer,

If you have are doing any volume I would strongly suggest you look at outsourcing this to a printing company. In house will definitely cost you more, Printer purchase, paper and tone stock, Electric, Staff wages etc.

At the cheap end of the market, the Epson Workforce range claim to be really low cost per page.

Since my laser just died, I treated myself to one. Base model, £100 plus VAT delivered (with shopping around).

First page out time is good - no warming up.

Quality is good.

Ink costs should be good - a high capacity cartridge (3,400 pages) is around £30 per colour.

Plus no nasty shocks when the drum or fuser or whatever goes (because ink jets don't have these), just a sub-£20 maintenance kit every 50,000 pages.

Speak to Nick Elston of KN - he is full of win with this and sourced me a great printer recently. 

Hello Omer,

After a bit of looking around i found the Samsung CLP-320 Colour Laser Printer seems to be a good candiate.

• Print Speed: Up to 16ppm and 4ppm mono and colour print speeds
• Print Resolution: 600x600 dpi with enhanced 2,400x600dpi resolution
• Paper Size up to 76x1524 mm ~ 216x3556 mm
• Operating System Required: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008, Fedora 2,~9 (32/6b4it)
• USB 2.0 and 10/100 Base TX network connectivity
• 256MB Memory
• 12 month warranty
• WxDxH: 388x313x243mm (except paper tray)
• Weight: 11kg
• 30% Toner Save Mode to cut printing costs
• Soft Power Button to reduce power consumption
• AnyWeb Software to easily crop and edit web prints
• Samsung Printer Language

Cheers