Color Your World: DIY Color Printing Can Save You a Bundle

TechNewsDaily Staff

31 March 2011 02:40 PM ET

CREDIT: Quinn Dombrowski

Everyone appreciates saving money — especially when it comes to office supplies, where costs can really begin to add up. Things like doing your color printing in your office, rather than taking if off-site, is less expensive than you might think. Here's what you need to know.

Places that enable you to print or make copies elsewhere, such as FedEx Office or Staples' dedicated Copy and Printing Center, can be a lifesaver for many people. If you don't have access to a printer — or need to create a slightly more complicated project, such as having something bound or made into a poster — a printing center can get all of that accomplished.

But convenience comes at a price:

The cost of printing color documents at a FedEx Office store or similar printing center can vary from 59 cents a page to 89 cents, depending on your location. To print 500 pages at these rates will cost you between $295.00 and $445.00. The cost of printing in your office depends on a few factors, such as the cost of paper and ink. An 500-sheet, all-purpose pack of paper will cost around $7.79 — and if you buy printer-specific paper, it can be a few dollars more — so each page will cost around 1 cent. If you have an inkjet printer, each printed page will use 9 cents to 11 cents worth of ink, a laser printer will run you between 4 and 5 cents a page, according to TopTenReviews. If you put all of this together, printing 500 color pages at your office will cost between $53 and $63 if you use an inkjet printer and between $28 and $33 if you use a laser printer.

That assumes, of course, that you already have a printer within your office. But even if you don’t have one yet, the cost of buying one will be made up multiple times over when you take into account the savings of printing in office. If you are considering buying one, inkjet printers will cost between $100 to $200, and a laser printer will cost somewhere between $150 and $300.

As you can see, printing at a home office is quite a bit less expensive, and that doesn't even include the cost of traveling to and spending time at the offsite printing center. In fact, even printing just 15 pages at an office printing center will cost you $8.85 on the low end, while printing those same 15 pages in your office would cost you $1.88 on the high end.