Know Your Total Cost of Ownership

In many cases, though, you will once again have to Google it. Once you get that information, crunch the numbers along with the info gleaned in step two to come up with a cost per sheet for consumables.

Doing the Math

Here's an example of how to do that for an HP 4730 (we have 16 of them in our fleet). Each black toner costs $156, and each color toner costs $356 including shipping and tax. Each toner has a yield of 12,000 pages at 5 percent coverage. To calculate the toner costs for a black print, divide the cost of the toner cartridge by the number of sheets it will print: $156/12,000. The resulting answer of .013 means that cost is 1.3 cents per black print.