The preliminary numbers have surprised me quite a bit.

• Brother – a company I’ve always looked at as being a good choice for a home printer – is hands-down the winner on a pure cost standpoint over almost the entire range of print volumes.
• Hewlett-Packard/HP, which I knew would command a price premium, is never even within 15% of the best TCO, with toner costs in its low- to mid-range LaserJet printers more than twice most other manufacturers.
• Lexmark, another brand that I expected to be somewhat pricey, was within 15% of the best TCO only with one low-end printer under very light loads typical of household use.
• Dell, while the numbers are incomplete, looks like a very solid value for higher-volume printing or over the long term (300,000+ pages)

Read More for print volume numbers and some specific printers.

While there is some information I haven’t either found or determined not to exist (e.g. do the midline Dell printers require maintenance kits/fuser replacements and how much do they cost if so?), none of what’s missing is going to lower the calculated costs of running a printer. For the Brother printers that lead the pack, I either have all of the maintenance prices and intervals or I’ve used a guess at how long a printer will last and listed the full replacement cost as the “maintenance kit” price.

This information is comparing Brother, Dell, HP and Lexmark monochrome laser printers; I’m aware of Kyocera printers but pricing is hard to come by. I do not currently have multifunction copiers from any manufacturers, but I expect that I’ll be adding many of those multifunction devices in the future.  I may not include the truly high-end copier/printers since those are frequently leased rather than purchased and may have widely varying terms. That said, for very high volume printing you should definitely check on what your vendors can offer you – I only ran calculations out to 750,000 pages (still less than $9000 TCO).

All printers listed have network interfaces; I feel that for business environments the cost savings of cheaper non-networked printers disappears when you need to hook even one of them up to the network. Other than networking, the numbers presented here do not account for printer features or accessories such as extra trays – prices for those will probably not vary too much between brands.

I’ve added links to many of these printers to the Fencepost Software Amazon Store, and I’ll link to some of them from this article. I encourage you to read reviews of specific printers and shop around – Amazon has decent prices, free shipping for many items and a good reputation for dealing with returns, but it’s entirely possible that you’ll find some of these printers available for less. For the smaller printers, you may even find them on sale for less at office supply stores in your area if you’re not in a hurry.

In the low-volume category, which I’ll count as anything under 5000 pages for the life of the printer, the Brother HL-2170W is a solid winner at $135-250 depending on volume and the need to replace the toner cartridge (it starts with a 1000-page “starter,” regular cartridges are 2600 pages for $49 or less which is ~1.9 cents/page). The Lexmark E120N is slightly higher but still fine for light usage – base price is similar, but it comes with only a 500-page starter cartridge & replacement cartridges are 2000 pages for $74 or ~3.7 cents/page).

For higher-volume printing, the Brother HL-5370DW (or 2-tray Brother HL-5370DWT) has a very wide “sweet spot” from 10,000 up to 90,000 pages. No other printers are within 15% of the TCO except at specific narrow performance points or at the high end of the range. This is a combination of a low cost for the printer ($215) and toner at 1 cent/page (8000 pages for a $80 cartridge), plus low-cost drum replacements. I based this on an anticipated printer lifespan of 90,000-100,000 pages, but these are still the best TCO for the print volume even if you change the expected lifespan down to 75,000 or up to 150,000.

Starting around 100,000 pages and going up to around 300,000 pages, the Brother HL-7050n is your best performer, while from 300,000 up to 750,000 it alternates with the Dell 5330dn (also at Dell). Either should be a solid choice, but if you need duplexing go with the Dell – it’s included on that one where it isn’t included on the Brother.

Raw Numbers

In the attached spreadsheet PDF (see below), the cells with a green background have the lowest price for the number of pages printed. Cells with bold text are within 15% of the lowest cost. Cells with the numbers greyed out are either higher than the median cost for that number of pages or are more than $0.50/page – either way, that printer is overly expensive for that number of pages. Cells with no special formatting are less than the median cost, but are more than 15% higher than the lowest-cost option.

Some areas of the spreadsheet will be changing – for example, I’ll be adding an estimated lifetime number of pages for many of the printers and modifying the calculations to assume purchasing another of those printers when that lifetime is hit. Right now that is accomplished on a few printers by setting the maintenance kit cost to be the price of the printer itself, with the kit interval as the expected lifespan. Those cells are mostly highlighted in yellow.

Printer TCO Calculations-20091230 (PDF Download)

The printers compared in this spreadsheet are: Brother HL-2170W, Brother HL-5370DW, Brother HL-6050DN, Brother HL-7050N, Brother HL-8050N, Dell 2330dn, Dell 3330dn, Dell 5210dn, Dell 5330dn, Dell 7330dn, HP P1505n, HP P2035n, HP P2055dn, HP P3005n, HP P3015dn, HP P4014n, HP P4015n, HP P4515n, HP 5200tn, HP 9040dn, HP 9050n, Lexmark E120n, Lexmark E260dn, Lexmark E360dn, Lexmark E460dn, Lexmark T650n, Lexmark T652n, Lexmark T654n, Lexmark T656dne, Lexmark W840n

Update: For many older printers, you may find the information at PrinterDB.com interesting. While I didn’t use their formulas in creating this page, I expect to check on their color calculations when I add color printers.

Update 2: Revised links to go directly to the product pages (with reviews) at Amazon, plus one directly to Dell. If there are printers that you’re aware of that I have not included, feel free to ask me to add them to the list – I’ll be updating it with additional printer models including multi-function printers.

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Currently I’m only focusing on monochrome/black & white laser printers. The same calculations can be applied to color and multifunction/all-in-one printers as far as printing is concerned, but they don’t take into account the potential added value of the additional features (and volume of color printing will vary by office). I’m also not factoring in the cost of paper, since it’s effectively a constant – it’s unlikely that paper cost will vary based on which printer is chosen.

It’s important to do these calculations when you’re purchasing printers, because if you’re doing any significant amount of printing you may end up paying thousands of dollars more than needed over the course of just a couple of years. As a simple example, for printing 2000 pages/month (4 reams of paper, non-duplexed), a low-end printer may cost well over $2000 to use over the course of 2 years, while a slightly higher-end model may be under $1000 even with the higher initial cost of the printer factored in. At higher volumes the cost differences can be even more dramatic, and not just between low-end and midrange or high-end printers – price variations between midrange printers from different vendors can be thousands of dollars.

The basic information you need to do these calculations yourself are:

• The cost of the printer itself
• Toner information: Cartridge price and pages/cartridge. Some printers can use high-capacity cartridges, but they’re not always cheaper per page…. The capacity of the cartridge that shipped with the printer may also be important for low-volume uses. Toner cost per page is the single most important item in determining printer cost in almost all situations. Toner cost can range from 0.4 cents per page to 4 cents per page – when you’re printing 100,000 pages, that’s $400 vs. $4,000.
• Drum information: Some printers have the drum and toner cartridge as a single unit, some require that the drum be replaced separately. If the printer needs drum replacement, get drum price and lifespan (pages/drum)
• Maintenance Kit information: Higher-volume printers often require a maintenance kit after 200-300 thousand pages. These kits frequently include a fuser unit and replacement rollers, and may cost several hundred dollars.

Once you have all of those numbers, it’s just some basic arithmetic to calculate how many toner cartridges, drums and maintenance kits you’ll need based on the number of pages you expect to print, then add that to the price of the printer. If you’re not sure about how many pages you’ll be printing, think about how much paper you’re purchasing – each ream is 500 sheets, each box is 5000. If you’re going through a box of paper every two months (excluding copier usage), then you’re printing around 2500 pages/month or 30,000/year.

Doing these calculations by hand is fairly simple – for example, if a maintenance kit is good for 250,000 pages and you’re only calculating out to 120,000 pages then you need zero kits.

If you’re going to be putting this into a spreadsheet for comparing different printers, then things get a little stranger. The formula I’m using will be getting a bit more complicated, but for now it looks something like this:

=PrinterPrice+
(TRUNC((PagesPrinted-StarterPages)/TonerPages)+1)*TonerPrice+
IF(AND(ISNUMBER(DrumPages), ISNUMBER(DrumPrice)),TRUNC(PagesPrinted/DrumPages)*DrumPrice,0)+
IF(AND(ISNUMBER(KitPages),ISNUMBER(KitPrice)),TRUNC(PagesPrinted/KitPages)*KitPrice,0)

That formula factors in the price of the printer, the price of toner (including the cartridge that ships with the printer), the price of replacement drum kits if needed and the price of maintenance kits if needed. Eventually it’s going to include a “maintenance kit” estimate for printers that don’t need them; that estimate will likely be a “printer lifespan” number based on the Maximum Monthly Duty Cycle number provided by all printer manufacturers and will operate on the expectation that instead of a maintenance kit the printer will simply be replaced.

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