Comments on: Cost of Printing

By: Claire

Claire — Sun, 06 May 2007 23:24:22 +0000

If anyone reading this on the greater Eastside has a printer that’s limping along that needs a home…my friend who has just escaped an abusive marriage needs a printer for her school work. She is in a special program for homemakers returning to the workforce, and so has access to a printer at school, but it would be helpful to be able to occasionally print things out at home, too.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 03 May 2007 05:09:11 +0000

I suspect you’ll find that the K5400 turns out to be even cheaper to operate than you’ve calculated, because you *won’t* be using up the C,Y & M at equal rates.

Many years ago we had a HP XL300 at work that managed to chew through the (horribly expensive) yellow cartridges at about double the rate of the other three colours. If it had used combined CYM cartridges we would have been even less happy than we were. We eventually replaced it with a HP 2500CM, which paid for itself inside a year in what we saved on cartridge costs over the XL300.

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:48:43 +0000

Good point, Gardner. If I have time, I’ll dig up those numbers.

I found this comparison of various third-party inks:

The highest score for a paper and ink is shared by three different combinations, on three different printers, all of which scored 8.29/10 overall: [...] HP machine printing on HP paper with Cartridge World ink [...]“

They’re still looking into the longevity claims — which are specious for me since my printing is rarely “preserving documents ten years.”

By: Gardner Cohen

Gardner Cohen — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 07:48:23 +0000

You ought to compare these costs with a cheap color laser. When our DJ880C dies, that’s the route I’m taking.

There are websites that sell HP remanufactured ink cartridges for less than half the price of real/new ones.