|
Home > About printers >Why buy a refurbished laser printer?
|
Why buy a refurbished laser printer?
In choosing a laser printer, you must consider the total cost of ownership. This includes purchase price, operating costs, support and repair costs.
Most people tend to focus on the initial purchase price and do not consider other costs which can be more significant in the long run. You should pay particular attention
to the cost per page of toner as you will probably spend much more money on toner cartridges than on the initial purchase of the printer. It is sensible to buy a refurbished
laser printer from us because you can buy a refurbished business printer for about the same price as a new home/office model.
If you are in a large organisation with many existing printers, there is another reason to buy our refurbished laser printers. We can offer you refurbished printers of the
same model as those that you already have. It is usually not possible to buy new models of the type that you have previously purchased as manufacturers change their model
line-up fairly frequently. Buying more of the same model leads to a huge reduction in training, maintenance and support costs as compared with introducing a completely new
model range into your environment. If you have a problem with a particular printer, you can swap it out for another one of the same model without having to load new drivers,
etc. Our fully refurbished models with up to 12 months warranty will be virtually as reliable as any new printers that you might choose. At the prices that we offer,
you can even afford to have a few spares.
Another reason to buy a refurbished laser printer is that you can readily buy premium remanufactured toner cartridges for them. This will save you a lot of money and save
the environment a lot of damage. Premium remanufactured cartridges are not usually available for new models until they have been in service for at least a year or two: it takes
time for after-market manufacturers to develop and test the new components for use in the new models. It also takes time for a reasonable supply of empty cartridges to
become available for recycling.
If your existing printer has just failed and you have a supply of unused cartridges sitting in your cupboard, you have a simple solution: buy a replacement refurbished printer
from us to match the one that has just died.
Saving our environment
It takes far fewer resources to re-manufacture a used laser printer than it does to build a completely new one. It you have concerns about global warming and our impact
on our environment, you can "do your bit" to help by buying a refurbished laser printer. The printers that we buy have done nothing like their full life cycle of work
and sending them to landfill prematurely is not what we should be doing. Similarly, you can help by using premium remanufactured toner cartridges instead of new ones.
Home/office printers
The purchase price of new monochrome laser printers can vary from $400 to over $4,000 dollars. At the cheaper end of the market, you will find personal printers and home/office printers.
These are designed for light use eg 2,000 pages per year. They are expensive to run due to the high cost and small capacity of their toner cartridges ?around 5 cents per page
just for the supply of toner. The cost of toner is not so important if you are only printing a small number of pages per year but it does matter in a workgroup situation such
as a classroom or computer lab. These light duty printers do not stand up well to heavy use and you can then have expensive repair costs. They are designed to be cheap to
manufacture but not necessarily cheap to repair. It is usually time consuming to access parts that need to be replaced and time is money in repair costs. The availability of
after-market parts is limited and parts prices are high. Some of these small printers can cost up to $250 in repair bills after only 5,000 pages - an additional operating cost
of 5 cents per page.
It is not good for your pocket and not good for the environment to buy cheap printers that are expensive to operate, that are not designed to last and not economic to repair.
Business printers
The printers that we sell were expensive to buy when new but our prices for refurbished printers are affordable. Our heavy-duty printers are fast and reliable, economical
to operate and economical to repair. They have large capacity toner cartridges that are readily available as new or remanufactured products. They have large capacity paper trays,
typically 250 to 500 pages as standard: this reduces the need to constantly load more paper. They have LCD control panels to make it easy to control and configure the printer
and to interpret error messages. They all have provision for internal print servers to facilitate direct connection to networks: internal 10/100 Ethernet print servers are almost
300 times faster than sending data via a parallel port. We add 32mb or 64mb additional memory to most monochrome models to enhance their network performance. This also facilitates
printing large PDF files, large spreadsheets or photographs.
Our printers have many options such as duplexers for double-sided printing, automatic envelope feeders and additional input and output trays. Most of these accessories are simply
not available on home/office models. These accessories are also quite expensive to buy as new products. For example, a duplexer for a Lexmark Optra T laser printer will cost you
about $550 plus GST if bought with a new printer. We sell the same duplexer for $200 plus GST. An additional 500 sheet input paper feeder for an Optra T will cost you about $500
plus GST as a new product whereas we sell the same item for $100 plus GST. A Lexmark Marknet 2001e internal 10/100 Ethernet print server (network card) for a Lexmark T serieslaser
printer used to cost around $500 plus GST when new but we sell the same product for $150 plus GST. The same print server can also be used in a wide range of Lexmark models as they
all have the same internal connections
Our printers are heavy-duty models with high duty cycles i.e. they are rated at 65,000 to 200,000 pages per month. They also have high maintenance intervals i.e. 200,000 to 350,000
pages printed. The recommended maintenance interval is the number of pages that some key components (fuser, transfer roller and paper pick-up rollers) are expected to last in normal
use. This set of components is usually referred to as a Maintenance Kit. You will find photographs and prices of maintenance kit components for some popular Lexmark and HP printers
in our spaqre parts section. A Lexmark T522n laser printer has a recommended maintenance interval of 250,000 pages and most people would take some years to print that many pages.
If you buy a genuine maintenance kit, it will cost in excess of $800. However, we can rebuild your old fuser with new, high quality, after-market parts for around $275; a new
transfer roller will cost around $50; and paper pick-up rollers will cost $15. Your Lexmark T522N laser printer will then be ready to print the next 250,000 pages.
Reliability and operating costs
Our refurbished printers stand up well to the challenging conditions often found in school classrooms and computer labs. They have well designed and good quality paper feeding systems
and this means that paper jams occur infrequently. The printers are of rugged construction and are not easily damaged by impatient users pulling and tugging at paper jams when they do
occur. Our Lexmark and HP printers have well developed and tested network software and this makes them easy to install and support. Their toner cartridges do not need changing on a
monthly basis.
Some schools have reported up to a 90% reduction in support costs after installing our refurbished printers. You might review some of the comments made in our Customer Feedback section.
We have sold over 4,000 refurbished laser printers and we have had very few problems with them. Hence, we can provide a one month satisfaction guarantee (purchase price refunded)
and up to a 12 month return-to-base warranty on our printers.
View our complete range of refurbished printers here
