That ink in your inkjet printer costs about 300 to 500 times the cost of gasoline, according to research by the . So if there was technology that would let you save ink in the same way that a hybrid car saves gasoline, that can mean hundreds of dollars per year in reducing printing expenses. While there is no hard and fast rule, I’d say if you find yourself buying ink cartridges at least every other month, you should consider trading in and up to a laser printer. New entry level home and small office laser printers are priced as low as $50 today and made by reputable printer makers like Brother, Lexmark, Samsung, and Canon. HP laserjet printers start at about $99, but often the difference in entry cost is made up if you decide to resell the printer within a 2-3 year timeframe. Also, deeply discounted remanufactured cartridges are most widely available for HP printers. A $20-$25 remanufactured toner cartridge can save up to 75% the cost of an OEM cartridge, and can be rated for 2500-5000 pages, depending on the model. In any event, that is about 10 to 20 times the yield of the best ink cartridge technology.
If you’re looking to be green and save green by looking for a used laser printer, I recommend looking on craigslist first, as quality laser printers are heavy and expensive to ship from ebay vendors. You can find quality printers that were built for high volume office environments that feature tank like construction. Even if they are ten years old, they still are a workhorse for small office and home use. My favorite used printers are more than ten years old and print as crisply as the new ones do. I recommend looking at HP models that have or can accept the internal Jetdirect Ethernet print server cards, so that you can connect the printer to your wifi router and then print wirelessly from anywhere on the network. I would stay away from printers that only take a parallel printer cable as they are just too old and may not have drivers for the latest editions of Windows or OS X.
I have an old Brother HL-1240 that I bought for $10 that works great via USB cable. I have added Jetdirect adapters to HP Laserjet 2100, 2200, 2300, 4000, and 4050 printers and have successfully printed wirelessly to each one via my router. The Jetdirect cards are available used on ebay for about $12-$20 each on ebay and the model 600n, 610n, and 615n all perform about the same. Add on network cards are not available or not available economically for Brother, Dell, Lexmark, Samsung or Canon printers and they would need to be connected via an external print server or directly via USB with an Apple Airport Base Station.
If you want an all-in-one printer, scanner, copier, fax, nothing beats laser technology. Small office grade new AIO (all-in-one) or MFC (multi-function-copier) printers are available on special for about $100-$150 at any of the big box office supply stores and are made by Brother or Canon. HP Laserjet AIOs start at about $199. You need to be a bit more careful though whether buying new or used AIOs as some of the machines on close out now or of recent production are not supported under Windows 7 for all features. I ran into this problem with the HP Laserjet 3015 and 3030 as well as a Canon model.