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Those speedy new color printers may be inexpensive, but ink and paper will cost you plenty. Our study of 25 models considers all expenses to find your best buy.
With the price of printers dropping to as low as $59, you might expect ink jet manufacturers to be awash in red ink, yet they remain firmly in the black. How do they do it? By reaping profits from another kind of ink--the kind that comes in cartridges costing as much as $38.
Ink is where the money is. Ink jet printer owners are using more of it these days for reports, presentations, and--thanks to the popularity of inexpensive digital cameras--ink-thirsty photographs. But unlike the printers themselves, ink is expensive. In fact, unless your printer sits on your desk gathering dust for weeks at a time, you'll soon find you've spent more on ink cartridges than you did for the printer itself.
For example, Xerox has priced its new model, the DocuPrint M750 at an inexpensive $149. But if you're a moderate user (someone who prints approximately 100 pages of text and 20 pages of graphics a month), after just three years you'll have spent double the purchase price--almost $300--on ink. If you routinely print photos, your long- term costs will run substantially higher. (For detailed prices of the ink tanks and cartridges for all of our Top 10 printers, see the chart on page 176.)
Xerox's ink jet isn't an isolated case. At $59, Lexmark's Z12 Color Jetprinter beckons to bargain hunters, but it ships with a single color cartridge. To print text in pure black rather than in a composite of colors that approximates black, you'll have to head back to the store and spend another $29 to get a black-ink cartridge, making the Z12 an $88 purchase to begin with. For a Z12 owner with light printing needs (about 25 pages of text and 10 pages of graphics a month), the first year's ink supply will tally $58, and the consumables total grows to $145 after just three years.
Because operating a printer can be more expensive than you'd expect, we analyzed the up-front and long-term costs of the latest crop of ink jets to get an idea of how much they'll...