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

[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

[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 !

[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

[The_Doc]

I reckon cheap printers are like cars.

Use them often and they run smoothly, if you use them once a month don't expect such reliability.

The insides seem mysterious and nobody fancies fixing their own.

The manufacturers are very keen that you use their (special) parts, but you needn't.

Spending more on one might get you a better experience , but the first rule of Bangernomics says the cheap one might be great if you can manage the hassle and the replacement