Don't Buy a New Computer Laser Printer Until You Read This Article

One thing you cannot afford to do, whether you use a printer for personal or professional use, is base your entire decision on which new printer to buy solely on the price you pay to buy it off the shelf. If you do, the cheapest printer possible could end up becoming one of your most expensive mistakes of all time, true even if you like the printer's overall performance.

Whether you realize it or not, most printer manufacturers do not make their money back on the sale of a consumer computer printer. This is why you can see such low prices - and sometimes even free offers - when you go to shop.

In fact, the price you pay upfront for this much-needed device often has almost nothing to do with how much you will pay during the life of the printer to operate it. This is because manufacturers usually make their profit on a printer in all the ink and/or toner cartridges you will need to buy later to keep the unit printing. For example, there are some Hewlett Packard and Epson inkjet printers that run as little as $39 to $49 brand new, only to discover the replacement ink cartridges for them may each cost almost as much as the new printer. I have an HP Inkjet like that; the printer cost practically nothing, but manufacturer-specific cartridges have me paying up to $29 a piece - and that's with competitive shopping practices, too.

The problem mostly surfaces around the most common inkjet printers, yet you can see them occur with laser printers as well. A laser printer has superior output, so your hard copies will be as crisp as possible. But although you pay substantially more for a laser printer than an inkjet, you can still face extremely pricey replacement toner cartridges. A client of mine gets hit for about $140 in charges every time he runs out of printer materials. He reports this price rises on a regular basis, too.

For this reason, I advise that only people who absolutely need laser printer results buy them, which is by no means everyone. Most people, in fact, will do better if they keep to an inkjet printer and then take a disk containing documents or images they need professionally published to a print shop where they pay per copy prices.