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Did you know that you could actually REDUCE your printing costs by printing at NetNomads?

A frank talk about printing options.

There are 3 important factors in printing costs.

The first is the PRINTER, itself, and inkjet printers are getting very inexpensive. A very good printer can be purchased for less than $200.

The second is the cost of the ink cartridges themselves. For a typical inkjet printer the cartridges run about $50-$60 for each set (a black ink cartridge and another cartridge which combines the colored inks).

The third is the cost of the paper. Printing high quality color prints is far more dependent on the PAPER on an inkjet than the printer itself. In order to produce high quality color prints an inkjet printer uses MORE INK, and it needs to be supplied with papers that can absorb all the extra ink.  Paper that produces glossy photographic results can cost as much as $2.00 PER SHEET.

The color cartridge on an inkjet printer has to be replaced when ANY ONE of the colors run out. That can really increase printing costs if a print job has a lot of one color.   If you use an inkjet printer sporadically, then the printing heads need to be cleaned before you can start, which also wastes a lot of ink.

The reality is...that even cheaply printed black and white prints on an inkjet can run as high as 50-60 cents a page, even on cheap paper. Typically, inkjet promotions advertise that a set of cartridges can print 400-600 pages which would suggest that the costs per page are as low as 10 cents, but my experience over the last year with my Epson Photo Stylus Pro has helped me understand that they always advertise those pages with very, very low coverage ratios; sometimes as low as 15%. My experience is that it isn’t uncommon to get as few as 60 pages from a set of cartridges, and 100 pages is about the maximum. At that point, the costs of the ink alone are almost 60 cents a page.  If I want a color print, the cheapest paper I’ve found is about $1.00 a page, and frequently more. 

The new Tektronix printer that we have added at NetNomads changes the entire equation. The inks are replaced one color at a time, reducing the waste of prints that are weighted towards one color or another. More importantly, the solid ink technology of the Tektronix printer creates beautiful color prints on ANY PAPER. That means that we can create beautiful brochures and beautiful color prints on inexpensive papers.

What all this means is that we can print b/w prints for as little as 10 cents a page, and beautiful color prints at 50 cents a page. Compare that to Kinko’s or Staples, at 8 cents a page for cheap b/w COPIES, and $1.75 for lower quality color copies, and you can begin to see why we are so excited about being able to bring this value to our customers.

This printer is also a LOT faster than any of the inkjets, at 14 pages per minute for single-sided printing.  Which leads us to the fact that our new printer will print 2-sided prints without any handling by the customer.  Furthermore, since the Tektronix is not using heat to generate the color, we can easily  print beautiful transparencies and iron-on transfers, jobs which are much more difficult to do on an inkjet printer.

So, in short;  The next time you need to print something, particularly if it is a large number of pages or needs to be in color, please come talk to us. An inkjet printer is a wonderful convenience for the page or two we need to print here or there. For bigger jobs or color printing we can make your job more pleasant and save you money while we’re at it.

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