Cheaper and cheaper: $29 for a laser printer

Laser printers are plunging over the price cliff.

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It's our fourth decade! Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously online since 1983

Incredible price for a new laser printer: $29

April 13, 2015

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2015, Al Fasoldt

Note: New Egg seems to have raised the price to $49. I wouldn't be surprised if it came down to $29 again soon.

I wrote recently about the Brother color laser printer that I bought for $179. I said its print quality is amazingly good -- in some ways, it prints photos as well as a good inkjet printer. It marked a new low point in the cost of good color laser printers, which just a year or two ago cost many hundreds of dollars more.

You can read that column at www.technofileonline.com/texts/tec030115.html.

Hold onto your mouse. I added a second new laser printer to my arsenal. It's $29.

Yes, $29. For a wireless printer that has both standard W-Fi connectivity and Apple AirPrint.

Times are changing. Laser printers are plunging over the price cliff. They will all get cheaper and cheaper as the months go by. They're killing the market for inkjet printers, and that's something we should all be cheering about.

Compared with inkjet printers, laser printers are faster, cost much less to operate -- maybe one-fifth the cost -- are quieter and, for black-and-white models, usually print at higher quality.

Two more advantages make laser printers even more beneficial: Their toner cartridges last far longer than the ink carts in inkjet models and, because they use neither ink nor print heads, they'll never stop printing from dried-out ink nozzles or clogged print heads the way inkjets do.

The printer I bought is a Pantum, a brand I'd never encountered before. It's the model P2502W. I ordered it from New Egg, which I consider the most reliable of all the high-discount retailers on the Web. The cost: $29, after applying a $10 coupon New Egg had sent by email.

The price is even better now, a few weeks after I chose mine. No coupon is needed, and the net price is still $29. (I'm rounding off the price; add 99 cents if you like.)

Without a doubt, $29 is an incredibly cheap price for a decent laser printer. I don't know of one that costs less. (It's less than half the cost of a toner cartridge for any name-brand laser printer.)

The New Egg listing is at this URL:

www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828731010