Let’s take a look at real printer costs. You are shopping for a printer and you compare the $70 inkjet to the $400 laser printer. But, as most of us have experienced, the ink is where the cost is. We are going to look at the 5 year cost at maintaining the most and least expensive printers. This information is courtesy of printer.com’s handy tool for evaluating printer running costs.

First look is at printing 50 pages per week of black and white only we find a large disparity between worst and first. The winners are below with an inkjet, surprisingly, in the top 5 but the others are laser printers with the lowest cartridge costs over the 5 years. Congrats to Samsung for hitting us for only $73 in cartridge costs over 5 years.

Now the losers in the 50 black and white pages per week contest. Ouch! The HP Deskjet owners will get hit for near $2400 of cartridges after only paying $76 for the printer and the Lexmark Z2300 $24 bargain is not so much in the long run.

Next up, lets look at color and the printing of 15 black and white and 15 color photos per week. Kodak show up 3 times in the top list and HP take top spot with a reasonable $302 dollars for 5 years of printing from the Pro K5400.

At the other end of the spectrum Lexmark show up again in abundance along with HP. Notice that every printer is cheaper than their winning couterparts above in initial cost by a marked amount but it would seem you will make your $50-$100 back rather quickly if you go with the top 5 printers.

There you have it. It would seem that Lexmark appear to be the villain of this story, HP is somewhat schizophrenic by appearing in both the worst and best lists and Kodak do very well for people who want to print photographs. There will be other considerations when buying a printer such as resolution but it would seem that dropping that extra $100 when purchasing your printer would seem to be wise and investigate the running costs based upon your expected use as the margins in cost are huge.