Buy a used business printer and save a bundle

Last Updated on August 7, 2018 by Dave Farquhar

I’m through with cheap consumer printers.

Due to the nature of my wife’s work, we print a lot by home standards. We buy paper by the case, not the ream, and a case of paper probably lasts us a little more than six months.

Our workload just isn’t practical for the kind of printers you find next to the telephones at consumer electronics stores. So I bought an HP Laserjet 4100. And even if a case of paper lasts you a couple of years, you might want to buy an office-grade printer too.

A typical consumer monochrome laser printer, if you shop around for a good sale, costs around 60 bucks. Replacement toner cartridges cost anywhere from $50-$70, depending on capacity. And at some point, which could be as little as 20,000 pages, the drum or the fuser or some other semi-replaceable part will wear out and you’ll have to replace it, at a cost of $100-$150. Most people don’t do it, since it’s cheaper to just buy another printer. And by that point, the printer will be discontinued, replaced by a new model that’s a little smaller, a little faster, a little quieter–and uses different, incompatible toner cartridges. If you got lucky and found toner on sale and stocked up, you’re out of luck.

Let’s do the math. 8 toner cartridges at $60 apiece, plus the printer at $60 gives you a total cost of $540 to print 20,000 pages. That’s 2.7 cents per page over the practical lifespan of the printer.

A business-class printer may also use $60 toner cartridges but they’ll last 10,000 pages. Figure two cartridges, plus the printer at $50, and you’re looking at $170 to print 20,000 pages and the printer will still have life in it. That’s less than a penny a page.

The longevity of a used printer

Businesses discard old HP Laserjets after a few years, usually due to requirements in their maintenance contracts. But they almost always have many years of life left in them.

In the summer of 2010, I bought an HP Laserjet 4100 from a computer recycler for 30 lousy bucks. The toner cartridge had about 5,000 pages left in it, and the fuser/drum assembly had 175,000 pages left. If you’re worried about longevity, don’t. After eight years, all I’ve had to do is replace toner cartridges and one set of worn-out rollers. I also upgraded the memory so I could print complex pages.

I’m on about my fourth cartridge. I’ve had some consumer laser printers last eight years, but supplies get expensive and hard to find at that point. When this printer needs a fuser it may make more sense to replace the printer, but we’ll see. It’s going to depend on what HP 4100 fusers cost in 2028.

Toner cartridges

It’s possible to find toner cartridges for HP 4100s at a cost of anywhere from $20-$50 and last 10,000 pages. The “maintenance kit” that includes a drum and fuser costs about $150. I probably won’t ever need one, but if you find an HP 4100 with more miles on it, you may.

Old toner cartridges have an expiration date on them, but you can ignore that as long as the cartridge is still sealed. But I recommend buying from 4inkjets because a lot of sellers on Amazon and Ebay sell poorly refurbished cartridges and call them new. Now, if you can score some sealed toner when you buy the printer, go for it. If you 4inkjets is having a sale and you want to stock up, go for it.

Why used office printers are a terrific buy

Let’s do the math on a less than ideal HP 4100 that needs a maintenance kit and toner cartridge right away. At $50 for the printer, $150 for the maintenance kit, and $100 for two cartridges, you’re looking at a cost of $300 to print 20,000 pages, yielding a cost per page of 1.5 cents.

I’m looking at more like half a cent per page, since I lucked into a low-mileage unit.

Either way you look at it, a used HP 4100 is a better deal than a consumer-grade printer. The cost per page is lower, and it’s a lot more convenient because you’ll be changing toner cartridges and filling the paper tray less often.

Even if you have your heart set on buying new, the economy is similar, but the financial hit up front is a lot higher. The HP 4014 currently costs $800, and the cartridges are around $100. At 10,000 pages per year, the cost per page is a reasonable 1.5 cents over the course of 15 years.

Personally, I’d rather buy a used older model that’s already depreciated, keep the up-front cost low, and recoup the savings quickly.

Why I like HP

And yes, I am partial to HP. One of the reasons they’re common is because they work well. When I supported printers for a living, I could almost set HPs up and forget about them. They didn’t even jam all that often. I’ve also supported a lot of Lexmark printers. They were pretty reliable, but we had more strange issues with printing than I ever saw with HPs. And I see the same pattern at work today, though I’m no longer responsible for fixing the printers. The HPs just work, but about once a week the Lexmarks die suddenly with a weird error message.

And by virtue of being the most common, HPs will be easy to find in the first place, and in the long term, it will be a lot easier to find parts and toner for them. I owned a Lexmark 4039 laser printer for many years, but the toner was more expensive than HP toner because it was harder to find, and once the printer was old enough that I needed parts, I couldn’t find them at a reasonable price.

Networking

These printers often have built-in networking, or you can add it by plugging in a cheap Jetdirect card. After you assign them an IP address, here’s how to set them up over TCP/IP in Windows 10.

Cleaning up a beat-up printer

What about cleaning the printer up? Some offices are much more kind to their printers than others. My 4100 seems fairly typical. It had a couple of stickers on it telling where to call for service, and a number of black marks that looked like they came from shoes. Maybe it sat under someone’s desk for a while and got the occasional kick.

Labels come off pretty easily with lighter fluid. Squirt a little lighter fluid onto the end of a napkin or a cotton swab. In the case of paper labels, wipe them until they’re saturated with lighter fluid and let it dry, then repeat the process a couple of times. The label will peel off very easily. If any adhesive residue remains, another wipe or two will take care of it. In the case of plastic or metallic labels, just rub the edges and let the lighter fluid wick under it until one of the corners lifts. Pull that corner up some more, then dab some more lighter fluid underneath. Eventually the adhesive will weaken enough to allow you to peel off the label. Then wipe away any remaining adhesive afterward.

Some marks will come off pretty easily with lighter fluid too. Others don’t even require that much–some will respond just fine to window cleaner, or just a little soap and water.

Stubborn marks will usually come off by buffing with car wax or metal polish.

My 4100 looked a little rough when I brought it home, but it took me about five minutes to make it look more presentable.

So if you’re in the market for a monochrome laser printer, don’t go to any of the big-box stores. Search Craigslist instead for an old HP office printer. Toner for the older HP Laserjet 4 and 5 printers (which date to the mid 1990s) is harder to find than for newer printers.

Don’t pay any more than 50 bucks for a bare printer. Be prepared to pay more for one that has extras like networking, a duplexer, or an extra tray, but it’s not uncommon for people to sell those parts separately, since they’re often worth more than the printer. Networking is nice to have if you have more than one computer. Duplexing is nice but it won’t help you if you mostly print single-page jobs. If you don’t know what you’d use extra trays for, then you probably don’t need them. Upgrading the printer to at least 128 MB of RAM is a good idea too, if you can.