Go to any big box retailer and it’s easy to get lost in a sea of printers. With so many options and deals, consumers tend to gravitate towards the printer with the cheapest price tag, allowing other equally important factors to fall by the wayside. Many assume that if the machine comes at a a decent (or cheap) price, the cartridges, page yield, and print quality must be too. Especially now that most printers look sleek and stylish, we can easily get distracted by aesthetics from investing in a printer that truly fits our needs. In this article we’ll go over the ways cost can add up over the lifetime of a printer and also cover a couple of popular printers by type so you have a pretty good idea on which machine can get the job done best.

1. Be Wary of Printer and Cartridge Price
   Cheap printers generally use expensive cartridges. They end up costing more to maintain in the long term. A current real life example is the incredibly cheap HP Deskjet 2655. At first glance it looks like a steal. It’s an all-in-one machine, meaning it has print, copy and scanning capabilities. It’s wireless, uses both black and color printer ink cartridges and comes in a slick looking off-white color. The downside? The cost of the cartridges. A brand new machine includes starter cartridges that are partially filled which is common practice for most printer manufacturers to get you up and running. Soon enough, you will be back in the store paying full price for a brand new set of standard or high yield cartridges. The average cost for a genuine high yield black cartridge for that Deskjet printer is $30.99. and the color equivalent goes for $35.99. After one trip to the store you’ve already spent more than the initial cost of your machine. At that rate, you might be better off buying a brand new printer every time you run out of ink! We’ll go over ways to circumvent paying full price on ink later in the article, but for now we want you to simply consider the price tag of the printer and ink cartridge.
2. Find the Printer that Fits Your Needs
   Printers nowadays offer many different functions and features. You first need to decide if you need an inkjet or laser printer. Inkjet printers are compact, versatile and capable of printing both documents and decent looking color photographs. The majority of them feature all-in-one capabilities, allowing you to print, scan and fax with ease. Most include a wireless feature and require multiple ink cartridges to keep your machine running. Laser printers are considered the workhorse of the printing world. Common in offices, the most popular laser printers are monochrome, meaning they only print in black and white. For a legal office that prints a lot of documents and color is not a necessity, a monochrome laser printer makes the most sense. Laser printers use a toner cartridge to produce a print and although the cost of the toner itself is typically more expensive than an inkjet cartridge, they print considerably more in the long term. Color laser printers are also an option for offices that print a lot of color but instead of spending money on one expensive toner cartridge, you will end up spending it on four.