When we speak of printer cost efficiency, first think we consider is user’s printing needs. If lots of monochrome printing is required, one would recommend to have a laser black-and-white printer. For occasional 2 to 5 pages printing at home, an inkjet printer would do just fine. Once we decided on printer type, next thing coming is price and cost-per-pages effectiveness of cartridges used. That is, how much you pay for a cartridge and how many pages it would print for the money.

Hardware issues aside, there are many printing tips on the internet from users, experts and even manufacturers on how to save ink and money: using separate cartridges, printing in draft mode, choosing paper saving layouts, etc. Google returns 69,900,000 pages for “printing tips”, just check them out.

One factor I’ve never heard mentioned is power consummation.

Darren Yates from Australian Techlogg.com tested home appliances and electronic devices to measure how much power they actually consume. The power measured was actual or “real” power used by device, standby power and what Daren called “apparent power”, the power to be delivered to the device so that it worked.

Among microwaves and plasma TVs, there were two devices that drew my attention – laser and inkjet printers. The former happened to be Lexmark E230 laser printer, while the latter was Canon S800 inkjet printer.

When in standby mode, laser printer pulled modest 5.9 watts, but as soon as the printing started, power consummation surged up to 699.2 watts for a second during each page print. The inkjet printer started at 1.9 watts in standby mode and followed by only 19 watts top in printing mode. Obviously, inkjet printers outperform their laser counterparts, if we speak of energy efficiency in printing and Darren Yates’s verdict is:

Inkjet printers use up to 90% less power than laser printers while printing but things are pretty much even in standby mode.

Something to remember when looking for a way to cut costs.