The Total Cost of Ownership of a Printer

When you are looking to replace your printer, you need to look behind the initial investment and really assess how much that piece of hardware is going to cost you over the life of the machine. As the computer revolution continues to develop unabated, our use of the computer and the ability to print books, photographs, manuals, sales flyers and much more at a quality that previously only could be found in a graphics print workshop has become a reality. The impact of digital photography alone has created a huge market in specialist photo quality printers that is worth billions of dollars worldwide.

A lot of buyers are pleasantly surprised when it comes to the price of a new printer. Manufacturers, primarily the Big 4 of Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark are offering their printers at margins that are either zero or in fact create a loss for the company that is making them.

The real money in printing is not to be made from the printer itself but the printer ink and ink cartridges that you need to buy, and keep buying to make use of the printer. This is not cheap and the Big 4 are all tied up in legal cases in courts around the world trying to stop third parties from duplicating their cartridge design or using recycled cartridges with varying degrees of success.

Just stop and consider that last year almost 2 billion printer ink and toner cartridges were consumed and you can simply find out for yourself how much just a regular home inkjet printer cartridge costs and do the math. This is big business!

When you are buying your printer you do have to take account of the initial cost of the machine, but a harder calculation will be to work out how much you are going to spend in buying printer ink and toner cartridges. The average business life of a printer is three years depending on use, working out how much print use you are actually going to make of the printer and then calculating the number of print pages you will get out of an ink cartridges is a matter of some guess work but it’s not difficult to do. Once you have an idea of how many cartridges you are going to be using just multiply that number by the unit cost for an ink or toner cartridge and that is going to give you some idea of your total cost of ownership.

Use this dollar amount to compare printers with each other in terms of cost. The results you find are likely going to surprise you and go a long way to answering why that printer deal is so cheap.

The Big 4 know they are making high margins on the printer consumables which is why they are fighting so hard to protect their market but the tide seems to be going against them with a number of legal losses. It may be that we are looking at an end to cheap printer hardware as their market share continues to be eroded by the third party manufacturers and the recycling of ink and toner cartridges.

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