Everyone who owns a printers knows that it is not always cheap. Printing costs can run very high, but perhaps never higher than when you need to do a lot of color printing. This can be for home use such as printing family photographs, holiday cards or school reports, or for use in a variety of applications in a home office or work situation. When you are going to be investing in a machine to handle color printing, what kind of toner cartridges are going to give you the best return on your money?
First of all let us talk about what toner is and why it is expensive. Toner is essentially a powdered form of ink. Instead of using water to put it on the page it uses heat. That is what the laser does in a laser printer: it heats up the toner so it can print onto the page.
However, there are other forms of toner out there. Xerox has made what it calls “solid ink.” Solid ink resembles blocks of black or colored wax which are dropped into the printer with no cartridge whatsoever. The solid ink is also heat-activated; the machine melts it and puts it onto the page.
These are the leading technologies for color printing, but which one is going to be cheaper for you in the long run? After all, when you buy a color printer you are going to be feeding it toner or ink for many years, so you want to make a smart choice. Let us look at both kinds in terms of their cost.
Some of the best Xerox color printers use solid ink. Xerox 8560 ink for example is used in one of the leading products for small business or home office use. The 8560 can take up to four blocks of each color of solid ink, and demonstrated lightning fast speeds at 30 pages per minute in color. You can control the costs of keeping this powerhouse going to an extent: for example, leave it in power save mode but never turn it off. If you turn it off it has to dump the ink it has already melted, instead of keeping it warm and ready as when it is left on.
However, there is a bigger step you can take than just watching your power settings. Xerox, like every printer manufacturer, wants you to buy ink exclusively from them. But unlike many types of toner and ink, which come in proprietary cartridges that are hard to replicate, solid ink is easy for other companies to copy. The result is that there are other brands of solid ink that are compatible with the 8650 (or other Xerox products) at a lower cost.
Something similar is available for laser toner. Laser printers have their own advantages and disadvantages. They are considered to have very high quality printing and they are available from a host of different companies each offering their own unique features. For many years the laser printer has been the standard for office color printers, producing beautiful brochures and client pieces with ease.
However, laser printers are not easy on toner. They go through a lot of it, often very quickly. Manufacturers of laser printers have made it very hard for their competitors to produce imitations of their toner cartridges. They want to corner the market so that their customers buy all their toner directly from them. This of course means they can charge more for it.
But competition is good for the market – and for consumers – and third party companies have found ways to provide cheaper alternatives. Even when a company cannot manufacture its own compatible toner cartridges it can often refurbish original cartridges after they have been recycled. These refurbished cartridges are checked for quality, filled with toner to the original levels and sealed, acting like brand new cartridges in every respect. Once again, this means there is a cheaper third party option.
Choosing a color printer can be tricky. Determining what is best for your needs is a big choice, but you can make it easier by looking for compatible toners or inks to use for your machine. This way you can choose a printer based strictly on the features you need, and not on which company will gouge you the least on toner down the line. Being a smart shopper always pays off, but this becomes even more true when you are dealing with something as expensive as printing.