Printer Options
for Home-based Publishing

Most people prefer to read "hard-copy" books rather than electronic versions. Heritage History provides free online access to hundreds of outstanding History books, but many are unavailable, or very expensive, in print. The Heritage History Compact Libraries were developed to make self-publishing these books easy and affordable. The PDF files available in the Compact Libraries have been formatted in such a way that they can be quickly and efficiently printed on any home or office printer.

The key to successful self publishing is using the correct printing technology for the job. Many people lack the appropriate equipment to self-publish their own books, or are hesitant to make the attempt. The primary difference between those customers who ethusiastically adopt our approach to self-publishing, and those who believe that self-publishing is too difficult and cumbersone, is their experience with home printers. Those individuals who have access to, and experience with high-speed (laser) printers, are often enthusiastic about the idea of printing their own books. Those who are familiar only with slow, expensive, desk-top ink-jet printers, are often unwilling to make the attempt.

It is critical to our mission, therefore, of promoting home-publishing, to help educate homeschoolers and others, regarding low-cost printing and binding options. The price of advanced printing technology—just like that of all electronic devices—is dropping dramatically. High-yield (meaning large, efficient, ink cartridges), monochrome (meaning black-and-white) laser-style printers are now extremely affordable, yet there are so many options and features available, that selecting a cost-effective model can be very confusing.

The following guidelines will hopefully help you in deciding whether or not you believe it is a good time to upgrade your printing capabilities, and if so, which features you should look for in your next printer.

There are two basic types of home-printers: Ink jets, and laser printers. The following chart gives some indication of their relative advantages and disadvantages. It is hard to quantify some of these features because of very wide ranges in price and performace, but there are some unmistakable trends. The following comparisons refer to simple printers.

Feature	Ink Jet	B/W Laser Printer	Color Laser Printer
Cost	Low ($20 to $100)	Medium ($150 to $400)	High ($400 to $800)
Print Speed	Slow (2 to 10 ppm)	Fast (25 to 30 ppm)	Fast (25 to 30 ppm)
Ink Capacity	Small (250 to 500 pages	Large (3000 to 6000 pages)	Large (2000 to 4000 pages)
Cost Per Page	High $.04 per page b/w $.50 per page color	Moderate $.02 per page b/w n/a	High $.02 per page b/w $.15 per page color
First Page	Fast	Moderate	Moderate

Most inexpensive desk-top printers are ink-jet printers. Ink-jet printers are small, convenient, and easy to combine with advanced options such as fax, scanning, coping, color-printing. For some customers these inexpensive, easy-to-use, tools can seem attractive and economical—as long as they do not need to do not need to do high volume printing jobs. For large printing projects, such as self-publishing entire books, however, ink-jet technology is cumbersome. The problem is, ink-jets are slow and use small, expensive ink cartridges. By the time you have printed a few thousand pages on an ink-jet, you have may have spent more money on ink than you did on the printer itself. This makes self-publishing inconvenient and far more expensive than it needs to be.

A better option for high volume home-printing may be a low-end laser printer, and in general, this is the technology we recommend for users of our Compact Libraries. Laser printers use a completely different technology than ink jets. Instead of relying on a printing mechanism that slides back and forth accross the page to deposit individual drops of ink, laser printers deposit ink on the entire width of the paper all at once. They are therefore much faster—printing speeds of 20 or 30 pages per minute are not uncommon. Just as important, they use large, efficient ink cartridges. The ink cartridge for a laser printer will typically hold about 10x as much ink as an ink-jet cartridge (5000 pages vs. 500 pages). In general, laser printers are more economical than ink-jets on a per-sheet basis, and are dramatically faster (30 ppm vs. 3 ppm).

High volume black-and-white printing is faster and more economical on a laser printer than on an ink-jet; but don't throw your ink-jet away yet. There is one area that an ink-jet may still be more cost-effective than a laser printer, and that is for color printing.

On a per-page basis, of course, laser printers are a less expensive. But while monochrome (b/w) laser printers are highly affordable—and require only a single ink cartridge—color laser printers are prohibitively expensive for most home printing operations. A color laser printer costs in the neighborhood of $500, and each printer requires four full-size color cartridges, costing between $50 and $100 each. In contrast, color ink-jet printers are very inexpensive, and many rely on a single color cartridge. Even with a $.50 per page printing cost, you would need to print almost 1000 full-color pages to "break-even" on a color laser printer. For modest users of color printing, an ink-jet is likely to be a more practical solution.

For the purpose of self-publishing, we therefore recommend the purchase of a monochrome laser printer—not as a replacement for an ink jet, but in addition to it. It may well be impossible to achieve both low operating costs, and low purchase cost in a single unit for both color and black and white applications.

The per-page cost of home publishing is a very important factor in deciding what printer is best for you. Figuring out the effective per-page cost of printing for a given printer however, is exceedingly complicated. The per-page cost of (black) ink varies from less than half a cent per page for older printers, to five or more cents per page for newer ink jet printers. The list price of the manufacturer's ink cartridges tends to be about $.02 per page for laser printers, and about twice that for ink jets, but the list prices are misleading. This is because the highly inflated cost of ink cartridges charged by the printer manufactures has spawned a third-party ink-cartridge industry that typically sells ink at only a fraction (20 to 30 percent), of the manufacturer's cost.

The most important number for calculating actual printing costs, therefore, is neither the initial cost of the printer, nor the official cost of the ink-cartridges, but rather, the "street-price" of third party ink cartridges. Making a decision about what which printer to buy, based soley on the cost of the printer frequently leads to unnecessarily high ink costs. The business model for most printer companies is to sell printers cheaply—even below cost,—in hopes of making high profits on custom ink cartridges. Newly released, low priced printers frequently have the highest ink costs. It is important to understand this dynamic when searching for a low cost printing solution.

When researching a particular printer, make note of the cartridge number, and do not make a purchase until you have researched ink costs. For established models, you can disregard the manufacturer's suggested retail price for ink. Instead, type the cartridge number into Google, and you will probably see about half-a-dozen ink-suppliers willing to sell the same cartridge for a fraction of the price. It is the third-party price of ink cartridges, divided by the "yield" of the cartridge (the number of pages it is likely to print before running out of ink), that determines the real price-per-page of a printer.

The price and availablity of third-party low-cost cartridges varies greatly. In general, older printers, with large installed bases have far, far less expensive ink cartidges available than newer, proprietary models. The price of most common printer cartridges drops over time as the availability of third-party refillable cartridges increases, and the price of ink for popular, commonplace printers drops more than that of unusual, specialty printers.

We confine our recommendations regarding printer purchases to to single function, monochrome, laser printers. The following features, therefore, refer to simple laser printers, rather than those that combine multiple functions.

Auto-Duplex: For the purposes of self-publishing the main feature of interest is automatic duplex. This allows you to very easily do two-sided copying, and saves on paper and binding costs over time. The duplex feature, however, will likely add at least $100 to the initial cost of the printer. It has only been available on low-end office printers for a few years; most of the older laser printers with extremely inexpensive ink cartridges do not support auto-duplex. For persons who are committed to printing a great many books, duplex is a nice feature to have, but it is not strictly necessary.

Network Ready: The Network ready feature allows the printer to be mounted such that so it can be accessed from any computer on a local network, rather than being tied to one particular computer. If you do all your printing from a single computer, you do not need the networking feature, but if you have a home network, it can be useful.

Those on a strict budget may be wise to consider buying a used or reconditioned printer, rather than a new one. Even though printer prices are dropping fast, it is often much cheaper to buy third-party cartridges for commonplace older printers than for newer, proprietary ones. For this reason, the absolute lowest cost per-page printing costs are almost always associated with older discontinued printer models. When printer manufactures upgrade their printer selections, they frequently introduce new ink cartridges, specifically to increase revenues from ink sales. This also explains why some new printers with proprietary cartridges are very aggressively priced, and why some used printers, with very widely available ink cartridges are more expensive that you might expect.

If you do purchase a used or refurbished laser printer, make sure you know how recently the "drum" has been replaced. Laser printers require a new drum ($60 - $100) about every 20,000 pages. A refurbished printer with a new drum should cost significantly more than a used printer whose drum may need to be replaced within a few thousand more pages. Also, remember that commonplace models will have much less expensive cartridges available, and will be easier to repair than more unusual models.

Precise cost estimates are very difficult to give. There are at least six major manufactures of laser printers (HP, Canon, Brother, Samsung, Dell, Lexmar). New features and product lines are being developed constantly, so there are hundreds of models to chose from. Retailers frequently discount the manufacturers recommended retail price, and there are wide variations in the price of ink from both retail and third-party suppliers. The net result is a nearly incomprehensible cornucopia of printers with various features, prices, and cartridge options.

We have tried to make a small amount of sense of this mess, by listing several common laser printers. Of these, we explicity recommend only a few, but it is certainly possible to find better deals for both new and used laser printers. Our prices are taken from the summer of 2009, and will probably be obsolete by fall. The object of this chart is not to provide up to date pricing information, but rather, to give an idea of the range of options and their relative costs. The problem with comparing only the list-price of various printers is that such comparisons fail to factor in the critically important variations in per-page printing costs.

Be certain to note the wide variations in both the costs and the yeilds (number of pages printed) of various cartridge options. A printer that costs 3 cents per page to print versus one that costs less than a penny per page to print will have a dramatically lower operation cost over time. For keeping printing costs low, we cannot over-emphasize the importance you should pay to third-party ink costs. On the other hand, the price of ink for some of the new models is likely to drop over time, so in the long run, a newer, low-priced printer with desirable features, such as duplex, may indeed be a good deal in the end.

We believe that printing and binding technology is improving and becoming more accessible every year. Just as high quality, inexpensive printing technology has become far more commonplace in the last ten years, we believe that the continued improvements necessary to make home publishing affordable to everyone is not far off. As long as these trends continue the cost of public-domain classics will continue to drop and the general availability of these priceless older books can only improve.