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Are laser printers cheaper to run than inkjets?

I have absolutely no idea on printers. All I really know about these two different types is that the laser printers are a lot faster. I heard something about how laser printers run on "toners" or something. Would these be cheaper to replace than the ink cartridges for an inkjet? I pay a fortune for ink at the moment, and would consider buying a laser printer if it would be cheaper. Please explain :-) Thanks for your help

Public Comments

1. When you first go into a shop, the inkjet printers will seem much cheaper than the laser printers. However, the manufacturers make the printers at a loss, and gain their profits from the ink. It's not uncommon to see printers being sold at a lower price than the ink (however there's less ink bundled with the printer than in a cartridge). You can normally get a few hundred pages on a singe ink cartridge. A laser printer, on the other hand, has a higher initial cost, but you can literally print thousands of pages on a single toner cartridge. So in the long run, a laser printer will be cheaper than an inkjet. They will usually also print more detailed text and images.
2. Laser printers allow you to print more but the toner cartridges are still very expensive and if you want to print in color the price keeps going up. Also like to mention that Laser printers themselves are not cheap. What I did is I looked at all the cartridges at the store found the cheapest one and found which printer it belonged too. Its not the best printer but I don't print that much.
3. Laser printers work like a xerox machine, with dry (powder) toner. It costs more (especially the high end, i.e. one that is made to print a lot) to buy, but it costs much less to run. I have this printer at work (connected through network to my desktop). http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1745295,00.asp It costs quite a bit (along with the multi-function finisher that turns the papers into a booklet, etc.), but I use Office Depot (remanufactured toner), which is $150, less than what HP toner sells for ($260). Each toner lasts 30,000 pages. So far since it was installed a few months ago, I have printed 10,000 pages. The status page shows that I can print, at current usage, 21,000 or so pages. Basically it costs half a penny to print a business letter (that is how they measure the usage) with a generic toner. With HP toner, it costs one penny a page. This printer is rated at 300,000 pages per month. Not really made for home use though. See here http://www.hp.com/sbso/productivity/color/print_cost_calc.html