Colour Laser or BW with letterheads?

Hi,

I need to upgrade my printer. My old inkjet is costing a fortune in ink and not able to handle the volumes I need to print now. The usage is small business and home, I would have ocassional print runs of up to 1000 and more frequent smaller ones of 200 or 300 at a time. Whilst colour is not essential it would be very nice to have.

Now I am wondering should I buy a colour laser and have colour and volume or should I buy a mono laser and have volume but no colour. I am presuming a mono printer would be a lot cheaper on machine and toners. Also I am thinking I could get a good mono for the price of a basic colour.

To get around the colour problem one option is to get a commercial printer to produce custom headed paper to use for standard letters, leaflets etc. My dilemma is whether to get these done commercially (10,000 letter heads with photo = approx E600) and then use a mono printer for black text on them or whether I should go for broke and buy the colour printer and print everything from home and do my own letter heads etc.

What would people reccomend? Any ideas on price make or model also?

Thanks.

Heya , it would definitely make more sense to get the printer to do the letterheads done in bulk, and then just print the black on yourself.

The cost price for paper for the printer is much smaller than buying from an office supplies place. Plus you would use a lot more colour ink every time you print a letterhead. Plus if you need to reprint a letter due to error you waste even more ink.

Thanks for that. So you reckon go for the commercial letterheads regardless for the standard letter types. The advantage to colour on the printer is that it gives more flexibility if I want to deviate from standard letter type which I will want sometimes.

I was wondering if I bought a colour but used it mostly for black ink only, presumably the colour toners would last a lot longer and I'd only be changing the black ink occasionally. Would it make sense to do this or should I just buy a mono laser if I plan mostly black printing.

In an ideal world I'd get a good spec'd colour laser, get commercial letterheads and have best of both but I need to mind my budget and get the most efficient approach for my needs.

If you want to use colour printing occasionally, but mostly b&w, would it make sense to have 2 printers? You could have a high quality b&w printer, and get a cheaper colour which might suffice for your occasional colour printing.