Take time to research

A few days ago I bought a printer. Another one. At this point, I have no idea how many I've gone through in the last ten years. I spent three hours on the internet researching printers. This is a first for me, and if I had bothered to do that years ago, I would have bought the right one for me in the beginning.

I had always had people steer me in the direction of Inkjet printers. They say they are 'better'. The last few years, I've been writing. Now, I stop and ask, what do you mean by better? Better how? faster? clearer? prints more? color?

Since I also have a history of having inkjet printers, I know what I like and don't like about them. I love printing professional pictures at home. I'm not a picture person. I don't want to take 24 pictures and pay to  have them all printed up. Am I showing my age here? I'm sick of buying ink cartridges. Also, when I ran out of color ink, I wouldn't let me print anything. Not even a black and white page. Now, that's not right.

So, when I start my research, the first thing I looked at is what cartridge the printer used and what the yield is. Yield is the average number of pages a cartridge will print. I also priced the cartridges. Most web sites don't give you all this information. That's why it took me three hours. I would have to go to one web site to look at the printer, another to find out what cartridge it used, and even another to find out the yield.

I never did this until last week, but I figured I am paying 20 cents for every page I am printing, plus the cost of paper. Now that I know that, I started thinking twice before printing.

During my research I looked at laser printers also. They do have laser printers that print color. Most of them are black and white. 95% of what I print is black and white.

To make a long story short, I found a printer. I had to buy it online and I got it two days ago. It's a xerox 3210. The printer was $230 which comes with a cartridge with a yield of 2,000. I can buy a high yield cartridge that will print 5,000 for less than $50. Quick math, that is 1 penny a copy, plus paper. Yes, it is only black and white. But, who cares? I can print tons.

Yes, I do recycle paper. Save a tree.

So far I love my printer. I'm keeping the old one for when I want to print pictures.

Moral of the story. Research and know what you are buying.