Upgrading from inkjet to laser? Costs bucking conventional wisdom?

[Stuartb3502]

Hi,

Would appreciate thoughts and wisdom on our conundrum...

We started a business at the beginning of October. This involves sending out an initial pack of information to prospective clients. We're only in a pilot phase (restricting our ad spend whilst we strengthen business processes, systems etc), but already we're printing quite a bit (about 2200 sides of mixed colour /mono type and graphics for the welcome packs plus mono envelopes and then normal printing on top (we have to do a lot of printed correspondence for our clients). Let's say 1100 a month colour and 400 mono.

So far we've done all of this using an inkjet we already had (a Canon MG7550) - completely inappropriate since that was bought for a bit of home printing and photos in particular. It's manned up and got on with the job, but I fear it will crumble and die before too long and is too slow for our needs.

We'd always planned that we would buy a dedicated, suitable printer (with a preference for colour laser due to print quality on text/logos), but the choice is hard. Given our volumes (we expect to grow those initial pack volumes by x5 as soon as we have the printer and then continue to grow), ongoing print costs are a primary consideration.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that getting a bigger business class printer with bigger ink/toner capacities should drive down print costs, but we're struggling to see that in the numbers. We currently use non-original inks in the inkjet from a supplier I've used for a long time on this and our previous inkjet. Performance and reliability has been fine. My most pessimistic assessment of current cost per page on the inkjet is about 2.7p per page (we think it's probably quite a bit lower than this but haven't tracked accurately enough). Two sets of cartridges rated by them at 5468 pages is ~£30 (~1p page if you believe that).

We've looked at colour lasers such as the HP M553dn and Lexmark CS720de and Kyocera P6035cdn. Even just using the manufacturer toner costs and rated capacities, we get toner only costs of 6p to 8p. I'm assuming our actual costs will be higher, but even using these there's a big difference in costs between their best case and our real costs to date (about 2-3x and possibly worse). That's quite a big deal on our volumes.

Can anyone offer some guidance as to how we should be looking at this and whether our received wisdom that workgroup class lasers would offer lower per page costs is just plain wrong?

Further - what should we be looking at? e.g. Higher workload inkjets? Or do we need to bite the bullet and accept that for the quality and speed that a colour laser will bring to our printing, we have to pay the extra?

Bizarrely, a couple of the Lexmark models are so heavily discounted currently and come with decent capacity toner that we may end up buying several of them just for the toner

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I think you should not look for refill or such in your situation, you should go with the genuine consumables as supplied for your printer model. You better spend your time for your business and not to fiddle around with refill etc. The printer(s) or your choice depend on the type of material you are printing and the type and quality of local support by a dealer you can get for service, HP has series of printer models with page wide print heads like this one
http://www.pcmag.com/review/342853/hp-pagewide-pro-mfp-577dw
or you look into Epson heavy duty printers like this one
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2496623,00.asp

You should consider whether one big printer should do the job, or several of the same type, with the same
consumables - printers which can run in parallel, or can be used independently for different types of jobs, office - photos etc and can act as a backup for each other.
And you compare all that with rent/lease offers from your local business equipment suppliers.

 

[Stuartb3502]

Thanks for the reply. From what I read, I'd stick with OEM on a laser. I've had decent experience with non-OEM inkjet cartridges so not too worried there. Given our volumes, purchase cost of the printer is relatively insignificant, so even if they don't last a long time it's not a deal breaker. My last Canon died through insufficient use I think (black clogged).

I'd had a look at these models (I think the HP is called a 477dw over here or maybe they don't offer it in the UK). Good speed form the pagewide head.

The HP is a possibility (31,000 (!) page cartridge set is £405) ~1.5p per page - competitive with our current costs.
The Epson is £247 for a set of 4000 page cartridges. 6p per page.

Was really after a printer rather than MFP, but not the end of the world. Just surprised that there does not seem to be a laser that can get costs down.

I'll see if a supplier can send me some print samples to get over my prejudice against inkjets for text.

Thanks.

 

[Fenrir Enterprises]

Other than the starter cartridges I've never used OEM toner on my HP Laserjet P1505 mono or my color Laserjet Pro 200 MFP m276nw (demo model).

I bought a set of color carts for the 200 from Global Toner on Amazon about 18 months ago. 2 black and CMY were $100 at the time, it's down to $80 now. The blue and black started streaking about halfway through (900 prints). They replaced them immediately, even though their reply was "the squeegee wore out from being used too much". I can't imagine actually paying for OEM toner - it would be 3x more than I paid for the printer! I personally don't think refilling toner yourself is a good idea though.

If the graphics on what you're handing out are photo quality, you may or may not be satisfied with the quality even top of the line laser printers will give you.

 

[Stuartb3502]

Thanks - I'll have a dig around to see if I can find a suitable laser which will take aftermarket toner then to compare to my other options. As long as it's not too expensive then it doesn't matter if it only lasts a year given that most warranties are only a year (and then hugely expensive after that).

I'm thinking that 35ppm rated and minimum 10K pages (recommended) per month is where I need to look. We don't need photo quality or MFP for this one.

Agree with all previous comments that refilling not worth considering for this. We're trying to make a rational business decision rather than pennypinch.

 

[Fenrir Enterprises]

Agree with all previous comments that refilling not worth considering for this. We're trying to make a rational business decision rather than pennypinch.

A bottled CIS would be worth the hassle of maintaining for large amounts of printing. Unfortunately I don't think any inkjet other than the HPs that take the giant 940XL/950XL cartridges is rated for anywhere near that amount of printing.

Actually at over 10k prints a month you're getting to the point where researching pricing on leasing an actual color copier from Xerox or Canon or whatnot should be on your to-do list.