I have been using the Dell 3110cn color laster printer for 10 months now and I must say that it is amazing. I just checked the stats tonight and we have printed over 1000 pages per month 10,480 to be exact.
During that time we have put $100 worth of toner into it. Currently our black cartridge is at 40 percent, cyan and magenta are at 80 percent and yellow is at 60 percent. The black is the cartridge that we replaced previously. Let’s do some math. A nice durable ink jet printer costs roughly $150. A set of ink tanks costs about $60. Every 700 pages a $30 cartridge needs to be replaced. Color cartridges may go out sooner.
Most users go through about 5000 sheets per year. Between color and black, it is not unusual for an ink jet user to pay out $210 in ink for an economical ink jet and even more if you have an Epson, newer HP or older Canon. Heaven help you if you have a Lexmark that takes $45 cartridges.
Adding the cost of ink and printer, you will likely spend at least $950 combined ink and printer cost in the first four years. Most estimates are much higher than this. The average costs used by many online reviews for ink jet printers is $60 per 700-1000 sheets. If this figure is more accurate that you can almost double the costs mentioned above. True you can save some money by doing refills, but refills typically last about 50-75 percent less time than name brand.
Now for my Dell 3110cn. We paid $500 for the printer and 10,000 sheets we have put $100 worth of ink into it. We can see that in the coming 6-8 months we will need to put another $200 into it for yellow and black toner. It is possible that we could print for two straight years before the cyan and magenta need replaced. Over the course of 4 years we will likely put $800-900 into this printer. That counts the price of the printer.
Back to the ink jet. The $210 figure per year used above was extremely conservative while my laser estimates are likely too high. How about a comparison in quality. Lasers are not the best for photos, but ink jets are far more expensive than taking the photos to a lab. Laser prints are more archival and much more professional looking. The 3110cn is also extremely fast. I barely click the print button before the print is coming out of the printer. Even with the optional duplexer the prints happen almost instantaneously.
I highly recommend the 3110cn.
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