Color Laser Printer

From Eugene Eric Kim
Revision as of 19:32, 13 September 2021 by Eekim (talk | contribs) (7 revisions imported: Imported from WebFaction on September 13, 2021 with Interwiki prefix Eekim)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

In October 2011, I purchased a Brother MFC-9970CDW. It's wireless, heavy duty, and multifunction.

Cost Analysis

I'm starting to need more and more color printing, and the cost at print shops such as Kinko's has not gone down. It's generally about $0.50/page.

To figure out how many pages you would need to print to break even (vs a print shop), you use the formula:

number of pages to break even = (printer cost + initial cartridges) / (.5 - cost per page)

Given that cost per page seems to run between 1 and 10 cents, the number of pages to break even is generally about 2.5 times the cost of the printer.

More expensive printers take longer to make up the cost, but the price per page can be up to half the cost of mid-range or worse printers.

number of printed pages to break even = (Pb - Pa) / (Ca - Cb)

For example, top-of-the-line office color printers cost about $1300 and yield about $.07 for full color page. Conservatively speaking, that means it takes about 3,000 copies before the machine pays for itself. (At Kinko's, color printing/copying costs $0.50/page and quality sucks.)

A midrange color laser would cost you less than a top-of-the-line printer at 875 pages. The cheaper printer would also require you to print about 1,900 pages to break even with the shop price. So you break even with Kinko's sooner, but you're paying a greater cost per page than you are with the more expensive printer.

It boils down to the number of pages you plan on printing. For the December 2010 Connected Learning workshop, I needed about 600 pages of materials for 15 people. The March 2011 meeting is about 80 people, so that may be an additional 3,200 pages of materials. If that projection held true (which it probably won't), then this project alone would make it worth the cost of a more expensive printer.

Printers

The Xerox Phaser 6280DN seems to be my best option right now. If business gets good, the Dell 5130cdn looks great.

Printer Cost Cost / page PPM Notes
Xerox Phase 6280DN $400 25 $0.14
Dell 3130cn $500 6 $0.10
Brother MFC9970cdw $550 $0.16 / $0.13 (high-yield ink) Multifunction printer. Inexpensive ink. Wireless.
Dell 2150cdn More expensive than average. Step up from Dell 1250c and Dell 1350cnw, except supports duplexing. Ethernet, but no wireless.
Canon Color ImageClass MF8350Cdn PC Magazine Editor's Choice.
Dell 5130cdn $1,550 3-8 $0.11
HP Color LaserJet Enterprise CP4025dn $1,300 2-6 $0.10
Xerox Phaser 6360DN $1,600 42 ? Tradeoff between speed and quality.
Samsung CLP-315W $250 4 $0.15