Colour laser printer - toner costs

I was looking to buy a colour laser printer, ideally wireless and small size. I need it mostly for mono prints of text documents, although I would like the option to colour print now and then (but would rather avoid having 2 printers). Can anyone recommend a good colour laser printer with low running costs? I was considering the Samsung CLP-325W Wireless Colour Laser Printer, but am not sure about the actual toner costs, as all the reviews concern "first impressions" on quality and easy of setup. Have anyone used this printer for a while so to comment on actual running costs? I have been using my Canon mono laser printer for almost 15 years and have always been very happy with it, but they do not provide drivers for W7 and have to let it go... So I am not an expert of colour laser, do they allow printing in mono mode without using ***any*** of the colour cartridges or when printing texts in black and white they will use a minimum of colour anyway? In terms of toner costs, are mono laser printers cheaper than colour ones even if you were to use them only for mono printing? Any help would much be appreciated!

 

I'm not familiar with the samsung clp325w specifically, but every laser printer I've used to date has allowed a simple switch of either black and white or color in the print driver allowing you to force the whole document to print with black toner only (no matter if the file has color in it.)

For documents which contain some color pages and some bw, the first question will be whether all the black elements are specified as cmyk (k only) or rgb black and second whether all the graphics which should be black only are grayscale or k only and not rgb. With better drivers, there is usually an option for how rgb is translated (whether rgb black becomes black only or rich black), and often how grayscale is printed (black only, preserving grays as black only, or not.)

For a really rough idea, look at the cost of the toner cartridge and its capacity. Large black and white cartridges are often cheaper than the small cartridges you get in smaller color laser printers which can be pricey.
The trickle of color toner used for routine calibrations (e.g. when you turn the printer on) will be insignificant, but the color laser will typically still rotate the color drums even when printing in black and white, so there will be a small amount of wear cost if you use the machine long enough that you need to replace drums. Also there is a chance a color drum will be scratched by impurities that make their way through the machine, etc. There's also the transfer assembly which is more costly with a color laser and color lasers often have softer shorter-life fusers which allows the thicker multiple-color toner stack to fuse nicely than black and white lasers where the fuser usually lasts twice as long and is harder to damage. Whether you will use it enough to have to replace these durables so they come into the computation I don't know.

 

Hi Johnny,
Brother do a range of colour laser printers which you can force (via the driver) into mono mode so there's no chance a black willl actually be made up of CMY toners!
If you want wireless, you'll need the HL-4570CDW. This can also take a 'super high yield' toner cartridge (TN-328) which is 6K pages - the big advantage from your point of view is that although the colour 6K toners are about £160 + VAT, the BLACK toner is around £60 + VAT.
So you can print black-only mono from this machine for 1p per page (toner only).

I think this is market-leading in this area.

However, one word of caution, the colour, resolution and paper handling of this machine are good for an A4 office colour laser printer (and probably comparable with HP, Lexmark, Samsung etc), but they won't touch some of the £2K Okis, Xeroxs etc for printing photos etc.

Oh, one last thing, this model currently has £75 cashback or a free 3 year warranty at the moment.

Hope this helps.

Gavin
Send a Real Postcard - www.clickpostcard.com

 

try looking at a xerox 6130 its also postscript, and the toners are cheap on ebay ab9out £40 i think for a rainbow pack. Ive always used these toners and not had any problems.