Have you been noticing that your laser printing cost are going up even though you have been trying to cut down on printing to save money? It seems the more you try to save by cutting down the higher your toner cartridges are costing. A report by Melissa Riofrio in PC World explains why this is happening and again it’s just corporate greed.

If you, like many other consumers bought your monochrome laser printer because it was supposed to be cheaper to operate than a color laser or an ink jet printer, your not the only one. If you don’t need color printing why pay for it. Melissa Riofrio looked at 22 monochrome laser printers and came to some very interesting conclusions. She discovered that in the past three years models from Dell, HP, and Lexmark had gone up in small increments of between 2.2 percent and 5.8 percent. But for the same time period, models from Brother, Samsung, and Xerox had gone up anywhere from 5.5 percent to 28 percent! Seeing as the rate of inflation from 2009 to 2012 was only 7 percent, it seems these company’s might be doing a little bit of price gouging.

These large manufacturers will always defend their high pricing from the standpoint of how much it cost to develop this technology. That still does not answer the question of why the cost of existing technology is going up by 28 percent as Melissa has stated. I think a better answer is people and businesses are trying to print less to save money and to help the environment by not using as much paper. There are other reasons they are seeing less ink and toner being used and those are the sluggish economy and the rise in paperless alternatives such as smart-phones and tablets. How about businesses using the Cloud and apps such as Dropbox to store their documents in instead of printing hard copy’s?  Since I started in this business in 2004 I have seen a dramatic drop in home users printing photos at home. Consumers quickly realized that buying the ink and paper for photo printing cost a lot more than going down to your local CVS or photo center and having them pump out 24 perfect photos for pennies per copy. Another example is a public school system that is one of our customers. I seen a 40% drop in their purchases of toner so I called to see what was the reason. The IT person told me that they have told the students to save all their documents to their machines or to the schools cloud solution and only print what is absolutely necessary.

So for the vendors selling ink and toner these changes have meant less sales which of course means less cash. So what do they do to offset this, raise their prices of course. I don’t buy for one minute their argument of the high cost of R&D as being the reason for the high price, once the technology is there the price after a period of time should come down and we sure are not seeing that are we. No, they are increasing prices for no other reason than to keep their profit margins up where they want them. Very simple, less pages being printed world wide, less sales for them means less cash coming in which translates into less profits. The only way they can keep the profit levels where they want them is to raise profits.

The question now becomes, what can a consumer do? The answer is to convert to less expensive eco-friendly re-manufactured toner cartridges. HP and the other vendors would have you believe that the quality and page yield is inferior to the original product, don’t believe it. It’s like any other product out their, if you buy on line from a dealer that is selling the product at 90 percent less than the original you can just about bet it will be of inferior quality and will not get the full page yield it should. On the other hand if you buy from a reputable vendor or a local business that will stand behind their product you can and will get a toner that has the same quality and the same page yield as the original. In fact the aftermarket industry actually has some toner products that hold more toner than the originals and you can’t find these on any store shelves.

So if you feel like your being gouged and you don’t want to take it anymore, check us out at Ink & Toner Solutions and see what you can save you. We are a locally owned company that services the western Massachusetts area with high quality toner that carry’s a full one year warranty, one of the longest in the industry. We can do this because we believe in the quality of our products. We also provide printer and PC repair in the Northampton, Mass area. Using eco-friendly toner in your printer is just another way of going green in the office which helps the environment and you will be paying less than buying the original toners from price gouging companies.

We also provide printer and PC repair services in our down town location or at your location. Call us for details 413-517-0099.