It's actually pretty competitive. The 100 pages plan is £4.49/month in UK. If you use them all that's 4.5p a page. They can all be full colour photos if you like.
My multifunction printer cost £50 and a ream of paper (500 sheets) is about £6.
Commercial printers charge 10-30p a sheet. I even have an acquaintance with a pay per click service contract on his huge Konica Minolta photocopier who seems to pay the same per click as I do.
Where I am printing a black and white document is around $0.20.
A color print is $0.60.
So 100 black and white pages would be $20 and color would be $60.
Sure you have to add paper to that calculation but considering that is a 500 count for $10-15 thats still makes it cheaper wether you are doing black and white or color.
Now yes you do have to take into account the cost of the machine.
Well, it's expensive compare to copy shops around here. Color prints in very low quantities start at 5 cents per page. If you are printing a lot of pages, the per page price starts to drop.
In my mind, the value for the consumer is at the lower prices, where it's nice to have a printer for a few pages a month, but you know the ink is going to dry in the cartridge before you use it. I'd think HP's program will send you a new cartridge when you need it in that case, but I don't know. At higher volumes, it's probably less expensive to buy cartridges as needed, unless all your prints are full page coverage. But then ink jet has a weird niche; it's cheap, but it's worse for low volume printing because the ink can dry and foul the machine, and it's worse at high volume because the print speed isn't near laser (or highvolume impact!) and the supplies are expensive. It's great if you print a few pages a week to a few pages a day. Warm up time can be better or worse, depending on how long it takes to squirt all the ink into the sponge before it prints.
While I have long sworn off HP, I have been curious about this for 2 big reasons.
1. is the one you mentioned with drying ink. I have to imagine that given some of the low print volumes that they are anticipating this and it is part of the system?
2. Related to this, are they smart enough to send lower or higher volume ink cartridges based on your plan and usage.
It kinda makes sense that neither of these are outlined in the FAQ since ink management is supposed to be on HP's side with this. But I am curious (not enough to buy a printer and sign up though)
From what I can tell I can't find anything like that near me.
I justified buying a brother laser printer about a year ago after running the numbers for low to mid levels of printing and it just didn't make sense to spend as much as the places around me were charging.
It would be an interesting thing to look at what the pricing for things like this actually is around the country to see if something like this actually makes sense.
If I was doing a super low volume (but consistent) of prints I could see how the math on one of these lower plans makes sense given the options around me.
If you're willing to share, I am curious to know where you can get color copies starting at 5 cents per page. Although I don't spend much time looking at copy shop prices, I have never seen prices even close to that low.
It's a mom & pop copy shop near me. I'm sorry, I don't want to identify them because I don't want to publicize my ___location that precisely.
It's the only copy shop I use, so I have no idea if their pricing is unusually low or not. I assumed it isn't that different in other shops, but it might be.
WHAT?!
That's insanely expensive. You'd think they'd have to beat the prices to print things out at the local copy shop, at least.