Printer buying guide

The prices of personal printers look pretty enticing, especially those sub-$100 models. But keep in mind that the purchase price is just the start; the care and feeding of a printer can quickly exceed the original cost. Before pulling out your credit card, be sure to compare the costs of consumables.

Costs: Ink and toner | Paper | Extras

Inkjets are the least expensive printers available, with many models starting at less than $100. The catch is that replacement inks and specialty papers can drive up the cost of ownership. Ink typically costs between $12 and $30 per cartridge and can last for 100 up to 800 pages for the high-capacity models. More-expensive printers, however, tend to be more economical to operate because they have higher-capacity ink tanks and separate ink tanks for each color so that you don't need to replace everything when only one color runs dry. To save money you might consider third-party inks or cartridge refillers.

There's one monkey wrench to throw into seemingly simply cost-per-page calculations for inkjets, however: the cleaning cycle. Every inkjet has to periodically clean the printheads and prime the inks to ensure that there are no clogged nozzles when you print. This tends to occur at unspecified frequencies and use an unknown amount of ink. In many printers, when you replace an individual ink tank, it has to run a cleaning cycle using all the tanks. If a printer is prone to clogged nozzles and you don't use it very frequently, you sometimes have to run a lot of cleaning cycles before it's usable, wasting a lot of ink.

Laser toner cartridges vary greatly in price, yield, and print capabilities. Toner cartridges generally cost from $10 for a small cartridge for a personal laser printer to as much as $300 for a high-capacity cartridge for a networked workgroup laser printer. Toner costs seem high, but so is the yield. A cartridge typically prints between 2,500 and 10,000 pages (although some claim to print as many as 30,000), so the cost per page is a few pennies for text (at 5 percent coverage) and not much more for images (with 15 percent coverage). Pay attention to the expiration dates, though; some cartridges (HP's in particular) will stop working at a set time, no matter how much ink is left. Also, if possible, consider paying a little more for a separate toner cartridge and drum kit, rather than the usual combination unit. That way, you don't have to replace the drum, which is often capable of handling many more print jobs, every time you replace the toner.

Dye-sublimation printers have the advantage of a fixed cost per print, since each print eats up the identical amount of ribbon, regardless of photo content. On the other hand, the prices for packs of ribbons and paper can be exorbitant, sometimes as much as $2 per photo.

The biggest gotcha with many printers is the USB cable. Many manufacturers don't even include one because retailers want to sell you one separately for anywhere from $10 to $30. Before leaving the store, read the box to determine whether you'll need to buy one separately. For some business inkjets and laser printers, network connectivity is optional, as well.

If you're purchasing a workgroup printer or an advanced multifunction printer, you should also consider some paper-handling features that are frequently offered as add-ons, such as larger-capacity input trays; output bins for collating, stapling, and other finishing options; and auto documents feeders for copying and faxing multipage documents.