Have you been thinking about selling your printer? Looking at
today's prices for colour laser printers I wonder what I'd get for a 2 year
old Epson Acculaser C2000, original costing £2000. It's powerful and meaty
but the price of consumables hasn't dropped. So I've already spend £1400 on
consumables for it and in a couple of refills time, the running costs exceed
the printer price. Today you can buy an equivalent model for £1000 which
ought to get you a Duplexer, Heavy build quality, Postscript 3, two large
Large Paper trays and most importantly memory. Whatever you do, don't buy a
page printer(ie a laser printer) that might not have enough memory to hold
a page. If you've a printer with 32Mb, and the PC isn't sharing the load,
you may find the printer goes into a coma when you ask for a full page
photo. I'd like to hear that's not so but the C2000 has 160Mb and I can't
recall it ever stalling over a print job.
Other printer buying tips: > Buy a really popular printer as there's a
greater market for consumables. Also, like car buying, check the model's age - you can get discounts on old models a few months before new models arrive in summer.
Colour Laser Running costs Update 2006
Today the transfer belt, a very big consumable part of the colour laser needed replacing so it was time to take stock of how much the laser has cost to run. Here for posterity are the figures.
Purchase price Epson C2000 with all the trimmings £1500 ex VAT December 2001
Consumables bought to May 2006 = £1540
Value of consumables in hand (not used) £320
Net consumed £1320
Pages printed 21500 colour; 6000 black; 27500 total
Average cost per colour page excluding paper: 5p (or 10p including the hardware).
Annual cost = £500 (incl hardware)
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