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Article:
What Everybody Should Know about an Inkjet Printer: The One-Year Cost of Printing by: Larry Andrew You can purchase an inkjet printer for as little as $39. With a rebate, it may even be less. Not many people would argue about the good deal they got when they purchased their printer. However, the purchase price of an inkjet printer really doesn't tell you much about your cost of printing. After all, you do need paper and inkjet cartridges to keep your printer printing. If you go to a local car lot and look at the sticker price of a car, you'd see some of the following items: the base price of the car, the cost for each additional feature or package, the number of miles per gallon for both city and road, and the cost of gasoline for one year under normal driving conditions. What if you got this same type of information for your printer? Would you still buy the same inkjet printer? How would you feel if you knew you would pay more for gas and oil, in the first year you owned your car, than you paid for the car? Well the fact is, unless you do very little printing, you will pay more for your paper and inkjet cartridges in the first year than you will pay for your inkjet printer. This is especially true for the low cost inkjet printers. In some cases, the cost of one inkjet cartridge is more than the entire purchase price of an inkjet printer. If you look at an inkjet printer advertisement, you'd learn about some of the following items: the number of pages printed per minute in text and color, the time to print a certain size photo in black and white or color, the number of inkjet cartridges or tanks the printer holds, the near perfect quality of the photo reproduction, the outstanding resolution you'll get from (so many) inkjet nozzles and a packaging list of items that come in the box when you purchase it. However, in most inkjet printer advertisements, you will not see the cost of the premium paper needed to achieve that outstanding photo reproduction. The replacement cost for a black or color inkjet cartridge is nowhere to be found. About the only thing you will see with a dollar sign is the low purchase price of the printer and possibly the rebate. (They also don't tell you all the steps you have to follow to get your rebate and how it may prevent you from returning the printer to the store if something unexpected happened'¦ but that's another story.) Now, if you look at some of the most popular inkjet printers, here's what you will find about their inkjet cartridges. On the average, a black inkjet cartridge costs between $22 and $30 to replace. A color printer cartridge normally runs between $35 and $'60
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