06 April 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

It continues to astound us how expensive it can be to own a printer. Over the life of a printer, the owner can expect to pay many times the original purchase price to keep it supplied with ink or toner cartridges. This isn’t news to anyone—we have long known that the ink and toner printer supply business was extremely profitable for printer manufacturers like HP, Epson and Canon. Most people just assume that’s the way it is, was and will be forever.

That is, until now. With their line of ESP printers, Kodak claims to tackle the costs of ownership head-on. Beginning this week, the company is rolling out a new advertising campaign that attacks the high price of printer ink. We thought it would be interesting to see if those claims hold up to closer scrutiny.

Printer.com just happens to have an excellent tool for checking. Using our extensive printer and cartridge database, our test compared costs assuming an expected black and white output of 50 pages and 25 color pages per week on photo quality printers over a span of five years. This is fairly standard usage for at home.

The cost of ownership is clearly less expensive for the Kodak line of printers by a significant margin. We found the average cost of ownership over five years for Kodak printers to be only $616, a mere 550% of the purchase price of the ESP 3. That might seem like a lot– until you look at the competition. The first non-Kodak printer on our list, the Canon Pixma MP 530, will cost $779 in ink cartridges over five years, which is a whopping 842% of the purchase price of the printer. Brother’s MFC 5890 CN does a bit better, with ink costing only a bit over 500% of the purchase price of the printer. On the surface, that appears more affordable than the Kodak products, but the Brother ink and printer costs combined over five years still cost 23% more than the Kodak printer and cartridges.

All these comparisons assume the usage of the printer we mentioned earlier. If you do a lot more color printing, the efficiencies of the Kodak printers start to pull even further ahead of the competition. From Printer.com’s perspective, Kodak steals the show on ownership costs, and their bold claims seem to be confirmed. The gauntlet has been tossed down, and it will be interesting to see how the competition responds.