The true cost of my cheap, home, inkjet printer

[The_Doc]

I found a page which gave printing totals for my home printer, so obviously I tabulated:

Epson WorkForce WF-2650WF
Purchased (amazon) Jan 2016
3 in 1 colour inkjet printer with print-scan-fax
Google cloud print enabled.
£45.81

Ink purchased to date All Generic, none branded
£37.95

Pages printed to date
5178 of which 615 solely Black&White, 4563 mixed colours

Gives 1.6p per A4 sheet printed, not including the A4 paper (which would be invariable whatever printer I used)

I have had no problems with the non-branded ink, we print for home use.
I've printed 38 separate 4x6" gloss photos on Epson paper, and they were.... OK.
It does exactly what I need for home use, and I would say that it's good enough for light office/professional use too. Any ink bleed is down to poor quality 70gsm paper.

1.6p/sheet

[QuartzDad]

Bought an HP OfficeJet Pro 8620 in April 2015, cost £169.

Spent £100 on inks since then.

4120 pages printed or copied, 1800 b&w, 2300 colour.

6.5p/page.

Exciting.

[Matt..]

I haven't printed anything in at least 5 years.

Cost = £0.


What does everyone print at home?

[The_Doc]

Home schooling 2 kids over 10 weeks has been about 650 sheets,

I work from paper, I hate reading PDFs on a screen, I need to annotate manuscripts with ink!

Recipes get printed out and filed
Car rental vouchers, previously boarding passes, application forms.

Various and many things, I certainly couldn't do without

Edited by The_Doc on Thursday 25th June 17:29

[LuS1fer]

I use a Samsung bw laser printer. Cheap and toner ( refills around a tenner) lasts forever with what I print and never blocks. I threw my ink jet printer out. Forever blocking, fault codes etc. Never again

[techguyone]

LuS1fer said:

I use a Samsung bw laser printer. Cheap and toner ( refills around a tenner) lasts forever with what I print and never blocks. I threw my ink jet printer out. Forever blocking, fault codes etc. Never again

The only thing stopping me from going Laser is the fact they still can't print photo quality pictures like an inkjet

[LuS1fer]

I've never tried it on photo paper TBH but I know colour lasers on normal paper are crap.

I only use mine for care hire vouchers, concert tickets etc although phones are rendering those academic too.

[The_Doc]

LuS1fer said:

I use a Samsung bw laser printer. Cheap and toner ( refills around a tenner) lasts forever with what I print and never blocks. I threw my ink jet printer out. Forever blocking, fault codes etc. Never again

I'd be tempted with this, but I still need a colour printer, so it would be an additional product not a replacement. Then we're running two printers and my tabulation would be ruined.
I guess I'm waiting for colour lasers to come down in price.
We just get occasional blockages/misprints on the Epson, but nothing that isn't solved by hitting the "clean nozzles" button.
I don't install any of the manufacturer's software. It runs off a simple driver file !

[RS93]

Have a look at hp instant ink I find it very good, convenient and cost effective

[QuartzDad]

Matt.. said:

What does everyone print at home?

Not so much now the kids have left school, mostly seems to be a bazillion returns labels for the missus' shopping habit.

[The_Doc]

RS93 said:

Have a look at hp instant ink I find it very good, convenient and cost effective

Had a look. It's certainly convenient and not too much of an over spend.

I print 100 pages a month (5100 pages over 52 months) , which would cost me £3.49/m or 3.49p/sheet

I also bet it will send you ink when the printer tells you "running out". I ignore this because I reckon the alarm is set at 10% remaining, and it's a cheeky way to get you to throw out 10% of the product. I always gets loads more printed until the cartridge runs dry. The last page is streaky and wasted, but I can live with this. I also think you'll have to run about 40Mb of horrible horrible RAM hungry software in the background, permanently.

My existing method has cost me 1.6p/sheet over 4.5 years.

So, with respect to you and thanks, as expected it's a direct debit lock-in, costing more than the DIY method. I am certainly not trying to shoot you down. It looks like HP took 3 billion dollars in earning last year, I took less than this

[mmm-five]

Mine's an Epson XP-860 4-in-one photo printer, but I only use genuine inks.

Have spent probably £400 on inks over that time, and no idea how many pages printed, but do a couple of hundred invites/leaflets/flyers for family & friends a few times a year, along with regular A5/A4 glossy prints - along with all the draft work docs for proofing.

[Halmyre]

Our printer ran dry ages ago and haven't bothered refilling it. Unless you use it all the time most of the bloody ink is getting used up in the start-up cycle. So you take out a second mortgage to buy a new set of cartridges, and print off a couple of pages, leave it for a month or so and try to print something else and up pops the warning "CARTRIDGE EMPTY PLEASE REPLACE". WTAF?

[conkerman]

I bought an Epson Ecotank printer ET2650. About 18 months ago. Cost about £150ish

Still on the original charge of ink, and has taken a kicking over lockdown and home schooling.

Ink bottles are around £30 a set (genuine) and last yonks.

I'm not anal enough to work out cost per sheet.

[page3]

With Instant Ink it’s worth point out it also covers faulty cartridges. Due to lack of printing the black cartridge had dried up and stopped working. Usually I’d just have to buy a new cartridge, but with instant ink they just send another.

For me it’s m working out much cheaper, even though I was originally very set against the idea.

[robbieduncan]

My Dell colour laser is at least 10 years old. It's so old I no longer have the purchase in my email history! I think it was about £300 with the larger capacity toner cartridges when I bought it. It's printed about 2000 pages and still has at least 60% toner on all cartridges. I can't imagine an non-laser lasting this well and still working without drying out. It's big but it's solid!

[dundarach]

page3 said:

With Instant Ink it’s worth point out it also covers faulty cartridges. Due to lack of printing the black cartridge had dried up and stopped working. Usually I’d just have to buy a new cartridge, but with instant ink they just send another.

For me it’s m working out much cheaper, even though I was originally very set against the idea.

Pay and forget about it for me.

It's great, don't care about the cost, just print.

[toon10]

Matt.. said:

I haven't printed anything in at least 5 years.

Cost = £0.


What does everyone print at home?

Funnily enough I've just bought a printer. When we first moved into our home we threw out a printer as we didn't need one. I rarely need to print now and when I do, I just use the office printer. That was before lockdown. My other half and I are home working and won't see the office this year at the very least. Recently there have been a few things which cropped up which needed a printer and I realised I had no access to one.

So why do I need one?

We've been getting homework sent to us for our son who is in nursery so things like animal outlines that need colouring in and shapes to make into origami type stuff.

I got my targets for the year which needed printing, signing, scanning and sending back via email. Daft in this day and age.

I'm going through a probate application and I've had to use the printer to scan in policy documents and proof of ID documents.

As so many people are working from home now I must have been very late to the home office equipment party. I really struggled to get hold of a cheap printer as most places were out of stock. eBay finally came up trumps and I picked up an HP Deskjet 2632 wireless printer/scanner which is all the device I need.

[RumbleOfThunder]

Really interesting video on home printers. Some things I was aware of or suspected, others not!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHX6tHdQGiQ

[LuS1fer]

I used to have an Epson RX300 inkjet which did sterling service for many years and that included with a plethora of pattern cartridges.
However, it then suddenly decided it didn't like any of the replacements and gave repeated and infinite errors, to the point I decided to throw it out along with about 20 cartridges that just wouldn't work.

I stripped it with a view to recycling and found, around the impressively heavy machinery of the internals, lots of sponge which was just totally saturated with ink. It was vile. Not sure if this affected it but it seemed a very odd system.