Our Reliable OfficeJet Pro K5400

We speak to people a lot about the merits of paying up front for a better printer in order to benefit from more cost effective ink costs going forward. So now it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is and see how I’ve done on my last printer choice.

We’ve had a HP OfficeJet Pro K5400 Inkjet Printer in the office now for over two years. I must say that it has performed flawlessly for that time. It’s used mainly to letter-headed invoices and customer letters – we use a black laser printer for internal office materials, manuals etc. I noticed this morning that it was needing a new cartridge which prompted me to check on our usage over the two years.

Since we started using the printer, we’ve printed 4,824 sheets of paper of which  4155 were colour. With the OfficeJet Pro being designed for much higher use, we’ve only had to buy a handful of cartridges which has been very convenient. We always buy the extra large (XL) cartridges to save having to order frequently – too many of our customers mention their non-stop trips to buy small ink cartridges. Our cost per page calculation looks like this.

So the headline number is under 6 cents per page. I think that’s not bad for colour pages given that large office colour laser printers are often quoted at nearly double that – for example, take a look at https://www.office.xerox.com/latest/OPBFS-13.PDF

These prices are based on retail prices of ink. Of course, if you shop around you’ll be able to find a much better price and thereby lower your cost per print.

Another way of looking at this is in terms of cost of ownership, ie how much should the printer cost you over its lifetime. We’ve sold a number of low cost HP All-in-One printers recently, primarily to homes with low use requirements. These printers use the HP 364 cartridge which gives around 250 pages per cartridge or the HP 364XL cartridge which will run for around 800 pages. I took some time to plug the performance numbers for these printers into the same table above and the result was interesting.

Despite the much higher original price of our Inkjet Pro, these numbers say that for our relatively low office use, we’re still €70 better off having paid for the more expensive printer. Given that we’ve benefitted from the much higher performance and more advanced features we well, it seems like a no brainer. The benefit will keep climbing with every page we print.

It’s nice to see that even small businesses can get cost effective printing, as long as they choose their printer carefully.