With all those toners out there, it is often difficult to decide which one makes most sense cost wise. Andy Babin of Peach I.T. Service who supplies BlueBird and our clients with printer toners was kind enough to provide us with examples of how to understand and calculate printing costs. We hope this will help you better manage your clinic’s budget!
So, when you are wondering “Which toner should I buy”, think of the following:
Cans of tomatoes example:
Company A is selling a can of diced tomatoes in a 300 ml can for $4.85
Company B is selling a can of diced tomatoes in a 125 ml can for $1.42
Hard to tell! Can’t tell by comparing a whole can of each, so, the way to figure it out is to see how much 1 ml of each is, and compare that. Cost per ml calculation:
Company A: ($4.85/300mls) x 100 cents = 1.6 cents per ml
Company B: ($1.42/125mls) x 100 cents = 2.75 cents per ml
At first glance at the two cans of tomatoes, even someone good with math would have thought “probably close”, so, who cares! But it turns out that Company B’s tomatoes are almost twice as expensive. Purchasing the wrong tomatoes over several years for a restaurant for example, would be a significant expense! Toner example: Toners are not sold by mls, you buy a toner based on how many prints each toner will give (or yield). Therefore, you do the exact same math except since toner yields are given in # of pages per toner , you calculate “cost per page or CPP”:
Toner A - A Re-manufactured toner which yields 20,000 pages and costs $213. Therefore it costs ($213/20,000) x 100 cents = About 1 cent per page printed
Toner B - An original toner for the same printer for $170. It yields 9,000 pages, therefore 1.9 cents per page printed.
In this example, Toner A is almost half the cost!
Another way to think of it is: how much will it cost you to print 20,000 pages?
Toner A = 1 toner will print 20,000 pages, therefore $213 x 1 toner = $213
Toner B = 20,000/9,000 prints per toner = 2.2 toners, therefore $170 x 2.2 toners = $374!
ATTENTION: IF YOU DO NOT PRINT TOO MANY PAGES A typical printer lasts about 7 years. If you only print 5 pages a day for 5 days a week with vacation time, then in 7 years you will have only used about 1,750 prints so your real cost per page will be:
Toner A = $213/1750x100 = 12 cents per printed page.
Toner B = $170/1750x100 = 9.7 cents per printed page.
In this example, Toner B is actually less expensive for you because based on your low volume, you will use a much larger % of the whole toner.
For someone who will eventually use the whole 20,000 yield toner, Toner A is less expensive. Happy Printing! Andy.