[geeks] The price of printing

[Lionel Peterson]

--- Joshua D Boyd <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu> wrote:
> > The $1 payment is really a token payment, IMHO - as I recall, the
> > raw materials (paper, toner & binding) probably cost $1 +/-.
> > If you wanted to print a 250 page book at home, that would consume
> > 5%
> > of a 5,000  page toner cartridge (at $50 for the cartridge, that's
> > $2.50 for the toner), add in a half-ream of paper ($2? $1 if your
> > printer duplexes and you use both sides of the paper), and let's
> > say binding is free... You spent $3.50 +/- for your *free* book...
> > Factor in your time to oversee all this, and $5-7 doesn't seem
> > that bad...
> 
> Where do this numbers for operating lasers printers of like $.02 and
> $.03 per page come from then?

250 pages at $.03/ea comes to $7.50 - I estimated a bit less, since I
used a very low-cost toner cartridge price ($50 is low, most nice HP
printer toner carts run $75-90).
 
> It would only be reasonable to duplex.

If your printer supports it - if not, ad in your time for waiting for
the "odd" set to print, then flip the stack and sart again (double the
free labor, it's still free).

>  And I think we generally pay
> less for paper, like, maybe $20 a box, which I think is 10 reams.
> We do a relatively large amount of printing at my house, and those
> boxes of paper don't last all that long.

$20 for a box of paper is a good price, $30 is a more "street" price,
but I'll take your price of $20/case, or $2.00/ream - that means
$.004/page...

New numbers:

250 pieces of paper from a $20 case @ $.004 = $1.00

250 pages worth of $75 toner (good for 5K pages) @ $.015/ea = $3.75

Binding = $free

Labor = $free (double for manual duplex, if selected ;^)

Electricity to run all the equipment = $free

Internet access = $free

Depreciation on the printer = $free

Your 250 page book costs $4.75, or $4.25 if you duplex print...

In this example, oddly enough, custom one-off runs are *cheaper* than
volume printing... As we all know, it is cheaper to move bits than dead
trees...

Lionel

=====
Lionel

"Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten
programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software"
Bill Gates, in "An OpenLetter to Hobbyists" dated February 3, 1976
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