Most people know that when your printer finally runs out of ink or toner, the wallet will receive some bad news. The recent trend for printers is fairly cheap (almost misleading) up-front prices, and where printer manufacturers make money lies in refilling ink.
This is a variant of bait and switch; attract them at a low upfront cost, make people addicted (ie get familiar with the printer, set up on all their PCs and devices, etc.), and then charge when they run out of ink or toner A sum of money to replenish it.
Epson’s EcoTank printers bucked the trend; their printers were reasonably priced for the feature set, offering a range of features, and their prices were comparable to printers with very expensive refills. Even better, when you eventually need to replenish (and, unless you overprint, it may take years) you won't need a microloan.
Epson's EcoTank ET-4850 will cost you approximately $650, depending on where you bought it. For this price, not only is it equipped with four tanks full of ink (black, cyan, magenta and yellow), but you can also get printing, scanning, copying, faxing, document feeder, cloud connection and other functions.
Once you buy the printer, your future refills will cost you about $75 in total, which is enough to print about 7,500 pages with black ink and about 6,000 pages with color ink.
Replenishment couldn't be easier. Open the lid of the printer, remove the lids from the ink refills, and pour them out-it takes about 5 minutes to fill all four cans, and the empty ink bottles are completely recyclable:
Compare this with some inkjet printers with ink cartridges, the latter's refilling cost may be more than twice that; for example, HP's OfficeJet Pro 7740 pre-sale price is 329 US dollars, can be printed on A3, other features The set is also very similar.
A set of four (black, cyan, magenta, and yellow) refills will cost you $169, but there is an annoying problem. Look, you might think "Well, 329 US dollars, about half the price, and the refill is not that expensive" but... 169 US dollars refill can print about 700 pages (so, in fact, about 700 black and white photos ), And 700 colors, less if combined).
(Maximum) $169 for 1,400 pages, an average of about 12 cents per page. Compared with Epson's EcoTank, it only costs $0.005 per page (that is, half of a cent), and the savings will soon start to increase.
With laser printers, the numbers are even worse.
A fairly basic color laser will set you back around $350, which includes a little toner to get you started. It looks good, it's wireless, and it prints 18 pages per minute in color. It sounds good, right?
What happens when the toner runs out?
The black toner cartridge is priced at US$155, the color toner cartridge is priced at US$115 each, and the complete set is priced at US$500. The page yield is not amazing. About 2,500 pages in black and 1,300 pages in color.
To print (maximum) 3,800 pages for $500, each page is about 13.1c, which is more expensive than cheap inkjet ink cartridges and much more expensive than EcoTank.
Why would anyone buy cartridge-based printers or even color lasers for home/small office environments, I don’t know. Obviously, you can indeed achieve economies of scale with high-end color lasers; using inkjet, cartridge-based, or can-based printing materials, a busy office can hardly handle it.
But for those of us who work at home or in a small office, especially when the budget is tight, the EcoTank printer makes a lot of sense, and you will wonder why you didn't think of it earlier.
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