The Daily Technocrat

Laser printers are tricky, but you can simplify things by breaking down the cost of a laser printer over time into three categories:

• The printer itself
• toner
• non-durable items, like the transfer drum

The trick to finding a good, but cost-effective, laser printer is to break down the cost of printing to a per-page cost.

For example, I recently had to find a sub-$150 monochrome laser printer for my work. This falls into the small home office category. I found the following printers from my supplier:

Samsung ML 1610 ($99.99)
Brother HL 2040 ($119.99)
Samsung ML 2010 ($129.99)
OKI B4100 ($143.99)
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($149.62)

My supplier carries toner for all of these printers, but no drum replacement kit for the Samsungs. So immediately we’re down to three printers.

Brother HL 2040 ($119.99)
OKI B4100 ($143.99)
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($149.62)

Next, I looked up the toner cartridges for each of these printers, and how long the toner lasts:

Brother HL 2040
2500 pages
$ 49.87
$ 0.020 per page

OKI B4100
2500 pages
$ 30.10
$ 0.012 per page

Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W
3000 pages
$ 78.84
$ 0.026 per page

Next, I looked up how much the replacement transfer drums cost, and how long they last:

Brother HL 2040
12000 pages
$ 86.77
$ 0.007 per page

OKI B4100
25000 pages
$149.57
$ 0.006 per page

Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W
20000 pages
$ 99.27
$ 0.005 per page

Then, when you combine the two, you have a total-cost-per-page number:

Brother HL 2040
$ 0.027 per page

OKI B4100
$ 0.018 per page

Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W
$ 0.031 per page

Once you know this information, you can safely decide on what printer to get, once you take a look at the following examples:

After printing 0 pages (printer/cost)
Brother HL 2040 ($119.99)
OKI B4100 ($143.99)
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($149.62)

After printing 5000 pages
Brother HL 2040 ($255.88)
OKI B4100 ($234.10)
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($305.84 )

After printing 10,000 pages
Brother HL 2040 ($391.78)
OKI B4100 ($324.22)
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($462.06 )

As you can see, with a little work, you can save a lot of money in the long run by looking at all the factors involved in a laser printer purchase, not just the price. And in the case of these similar-performing printers, the more expensive printer doesn’t always mean you will get more for your money!