My wife needs to be able to print colour documents for her business, I’d expect around 200 -400 A4 sheets per month, mostly pictures onto plain paper. Can anyone point me in the direction of a decent printer with relatively low cost cartridges please? Nothing too pricey ideally.

I got sick of ‘domestic’ inkjet printers costing £60 – £70 going through ink really fast and generally being a pain. I ended up buying a HP officejet, wireless, A3, scanner, document feeder for £ 150. SO far still on the initial intro cartridges despite using it much more than the old printer, a full set of XL cartridges HP920 is around £45 quid but that’ll do 1200 sheets (Black), generic cartridge sets are around £ 25. Works out a lot cheaper than the domestic printer ink costs. Printer’s been good so far Officejet 7500 and I’ve got the printer only version Officejet 7000 at work.

Not sure what you mean by pricey but you’re looking at a colour laser i reckon.

Like this one – Here it be

Colour onto plain paper, speed and cost all better than inkjet for what you’ll be doing.

If you buy a cheap inkjet printer they always get you back with the cost of the cartridge.

This doesn’t really answer your question but one thing you need to look at is how many pages she prints at once. If it is only one page maybe 2 or 3 times a day then an inkjet will be terrible as they often go through cleaning cycles during power up which can cause the cartridge to run down quickly. In this case a laser is better if the quality is good enough for the pictures you are doing.

If you are doing a bunch of pages at the same time then the ink jet will start to behave a bit more like it’s specs. say it should.

She does house inventories so around a 20-30 page word doc with maybe 20-30 A5 pics at the back. Will investigate the HP option.

Thanks all.

I don’t know how true / accurate it is, or how good their kit is, but I read the other day that Kodak are claiming the lowest per-page ink costs of any manufacturer. Might be worth a look at their offerings.