The global printer costing project?
Buying a printer is just so damn annoying. How do you know which one to buy?
You could choose a dot-matrix, which is cheap to run but very noisy, and quite expensive to initially buy.
You could choose an inkjet, which is damn cheap to buy (some are sold below production cost), but then they kill you on the cartridge costs.
Or a laser, which is oh-so-luscious, but so expensive to buy, and so expensive to buy cartridges for.
Which is the best? It’s easy to find purchase prices, but what I really want to know is how much does each printer cost per printout. For some reason, no printer manufacturer knowingly gives out that precious nugget of information.
I did a little research online, and found the following info. (It may not be 100% accurate, which is actually the point of this post.)
| Printer type | Purchase price (Rs.) | Cost per cartridge | Copies per cartridge | Cost per copy |
| Dot matrix | 25,000.00 | 400.00 | 600 | Rs. 0.66 |
| Inkjet | 4,000.00 | 1,200.00 | 200 | Rs. 6.00 |
| Laser | 40,000.00 | 8,000 | 4,000 | Rs. 2.00 |
The table shows (fairly obviously) that a dot-matrix printer is the cheapest to run. But what’s more interesting is that a laser is much much cheaper to run than an inkjet.
Now I’m really anal, and every time I make a printout on my home printer, I log it on an Excel spreadsheet. So every time I change the cartridge, I know how many printouts it has done.
What I’d really like is for everyone to do this, and collate this info into one big databank.
So here’s my idea. How about someone develop a small FOSS application that runs in the background of your system, and whenever a print job is sent to the printer, it logs it? Then, whenever the user changes the print cartridge, they open the application and log that, and also enter the amount they paid for the cartridge. The application would show the user how many printouts the previous cartridge produced, and allow them to get a good idea of how much they spend on printing over the course of a month/year.
But even better than this, this data would be uploaded to a website, which would then collate all the information into one big database. This database could then be used to show the performance stats for each printer type (dot-matrix, inkjet, laser), and even for each make and model of printer.
This would give consumers an easy way to determine what the running cost of each printer was, using actual real-world information collected from users of that printer. It would help consumers to make more informed decisions when buying a printer, and would also encourage printer manufacturers to make their printers more efficient in terms of costs per printout. At the moment they force inkjets down our throats just so they can screw us on cartridges, and it annoys the hell out of me.
Anyone interested? I have no programming expertise as such, so I can’t really start the project, but I think it’s a pretty good idea, and I would love to help get it off the ground. The benefit of making it a FOSS project would be that the code for the app would be openly vetted by several different experts, who would ensure that it was not adware, malware or liable to damage a system in any way.
