What Is The Most Economical All In One Inkjet Printer, Using The Least Amount On Ink Cartridges ?

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8 Answers

Spencer Hall Profile
Spencer Hall answered
Hello HarryCPD,

This is a question that can be answered in many different ways, but I will provide the answer I feel is best for the vast majority of users.

First, you should decide if you need color printing or just black. Do you need faxing capabilities? Are you printing business communications, family photos, or a combination of things? Either way I would strongly suggest going with an all-in-one that uses laser technology rather than inkjet. Why? The inkjet printers are very cheap to purchase, but the ink cartridges over the lifetime of the printer are very costly. On the flip side laser printers are typically more expensive, the toner cartridges are more expensive, but they have a vastly

If you plan on doing a lot of printing and fast printing laser is usually the best option. Also I prefer laser if your printing things that need to be mailed without an envelope, for example envelopes or postcards. Inkjet can easily be smeared by the postal processing equipment or run due to rain.

The following printers are used to provide an example, I'm not necessarily endorsing them. The Brother MFC-7220 Laser All-in-One costs approximately $200, has a page yield of 4,000 and the replacement toner cartridge costs approximately $40. That means per page it costs $0.016 cents to print using this printer.

An equivalent inkjet all-in-one printer is the Brother MFC-845CW which costs approximately $200. This is a color printer, however the cost per page I'm calculating is only based on printing black ink. The replacement black inkjet cartridge costs approximately $21 and yields approximately 500 pages. So the cost per page is $0.042 cents for the inkjet. By the way, most printer manufacturers base their page yield figures on a 5% page coverage -- it's almost an industry standard.

Before you decide on an all-in-one printer get the price of the replacement cartridge along with the page yield on the cartridge. Take the cartridge price and divide by the page yield and you will get the cost per page. This is the most important variable to consider once you determine a printer has the functionality you need.

If you want to go with color laser, I personally have used and really like the Samsung CLP-550N and CLP-600N laser printer. These are not all-in-one, but I really like them for general business printing.

Let me know if you need more details on one technology versus the other.

Spencer
Ink4Less.comm
Tom Walker Profile
Tom Walker answered
Harry,

This is a very good question that you pose. There are many aspects to a printer that we need to look at while purchasing them. For me, one of them is quality and the other is cost. While Canon printers provide unparalleled quality, Canon ink cartridges are very much on the higher side. If you would like the best of both worlds, I would like to point you to Kodak printers which offer decent quality and come at an economical price.

Tom WalkerPrinter SME
Anonymous Profile
Anonymous answered
I have had a bad experience with some all in ones. Especially Canon while having excellent print quality use so much ink on start up, that you never get the #'s per ink cartridge they claim you should get. Even in grey scale eco printing uses the color! Upon contacting the CEO of the land where I reside he claimed this was all too technical for him and played it down. In the end he said that one reason for the ink usage was that all text uses black in, but any other graphics (even in eco greyscale) blend all the color inks to make black! So even though you are not using color in your photo Canon choses to use the color in order for you to buy more of their over priced cartridges. Just a warning for anyone getting ready to buy a Pixma series or any printers, especially from Canon. Make sure what you buy is only using BLCK when you select black or greyscale.
Daniel Kilburn Profile
Daniel Kilburn answered
A recently released printer, which we feel is incredibly economical with ink cartridges is the Canon PIXMA MG6150. You should have a look at that...
Anonymous Profile
Anonymous answered
I have a brother 420CN, and I'm very happy with it. Although the Brother ink cartridges are fairly expensive, there are generic cartridges on Amazon for under $2, making it very economical indeed. I have not yet found another all-in-one inkjet that has such cheap generic ink cartridges.
Anonymous Profile
Anonymous answered
I have a Brother 420CN, and I'm very happy with it. Although the Brother ink cartridges are fairly expensive, there are generic cartridges available on Amazon for under $2, making it very cheap. I have not yet found another all-in-one ink jet printer that has such cheap generic cartridges.
Anonymous Profile
Anonymous answered
Epson CX3200
Under £1 for compatible cartridges from EBAY
Easy to repair too
Aisha Profile
Aisha answered
In my opinion, the Inkjet printers are considerably more economical for color printing than laser printers. And amongst those, you should stick to Epson or Canon and if possible, avoid buying the very latest models.

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