New York, NY -- One of the verifiable truths in the printing industry is that printing in black and white (though somewhat boring), is (almost) always less expensive than printing in color. By “almost” we mean that for an occasional printer we examine, the color ink costs less, but it’s rare.
PC Magazine in a recent article noted that among the dozens of monochrome laser printers available to consumers and businesses, there are some that set themselves head and shoulders above the rest. The printers lauded by PC Magazine feature two machines from Brother (the MFC-7840W and MFC-8480DN), one from Lexmark (the T650n), and one from Samsung (the ML-2851ND).
For both the MFC-7840 and MFC-8480 models, there exist both a standard and a high-yield cartridge. The cartridge itself will cost just over $30 from Amazon, and with a 1,500 page yield, the cost per page is 2 cents. For the high yield cartridge will run you $43.50 from Amazon and yields 2,600 page making the cost per page a little lower at 1.6 cents. The MFC-8480’s standard cartridge yields 3,000 pages and costs $46.74 from Amazon which is a cost per page of about 1.5 cents. The high yield cartridge will cost $76.99 from Amazon and is rated for 8,000 pages which makes the cost per page just under a penny.
The Lexmark model, the T650n offers a variety of cartridge options. They have both standard and high yield cartridges either as part of their return program (cheaper cartridge, but are only allowed to use it once before returning it to Lexmark) or not. The standard non-return program cartridge costs $206.99 and yields 7,000 pages for a cost per page of 2.9 cents per page and the return program standard cartridge costs $153.99 but with the same page yield for a cost per page of 2.2 cents. For the high-yield cartridges, the non-return program cartridge costs $483.99 and yields 25,000 pages for a cost per page of 1.9 cents per page and the return program cartridge with the same yield costs $430.99 giving a cost per page of 1.7 cents. The return program cartridges obviously offer the better deal.
Lastly for the Samsung model, the ML-2851ND, there are the two normal cartridge options, a standard yield which is rated for 2,000 pages and a high-yield which is rated for 5,000 pages. The standard yield cartridge costs $59.99 so it provides a cost per page of close to 3 cents. The high-yield cartridge costs $99.99 which equals a cost per page of approximately 2 cents.
You can see from our comparisons that while each of these printers does offer a low cost per page, there are considerable differences in both price and number of pages. The Lexmark printer is definitely geared more towards businesses that print a good number of pages each month (200,000 is its max duty cycle and the recommended duty cycle is 3,000-20,000). Most likely for the other three models an argument could be made that they would function as a networked printer for a small business or a busy home/home office.
