There’s no denying that the cost of printers is low – unbelievably low, as a matter of fact. You can find brand-name photo printers for under a hundred dollars, and workhorse laser printers for under two hundred dollars. Color inkjet printers remain a bargain, starting at around a hundred and twenty-five dollars. If you’re not careful, though, what you save in the purchase price of a printer goes down the drain when you have to buy replacement toner cartridges or ink cartridges.
When deciding which printer to buy, it pays to determine the cost per page printed. That cost is calculated by the cost of the cartridge you use. Let’s say, for example, that you purchased a black and white Brother Laser Printer for $150 and an HP color inkjet printer for $150. A new Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) toner cartridge for the Brother printer costs about sixty-five dollars and will print about 2,500 pages. The black ink cartridge for the HP only costs about thirty dollars. Great deal, right? No, because the black ink cartridge will only print about 800 pages. The Brother cartridge will give you a cost per page of a little over two-and-a-half cents,...