Stark Black and White: Why The Monochrome Laser Printer Still Makes Sense

The monochrome laser printer is quickly falling out of fashion. Color laser printers are dropping in price allowing for affordable and vibrant color prints for nearly everyone. Yet, we are still finding the virtues of a monochrome laser printer as a superior bet for us.

Black and white is thought of as artistic or old in the age of color digital photography. Color film photography has been around for decades and most photos are in color. If you are like us and print very few color photos or anything that requires color, a monochrome printer is the ticket.

Our monochrome printer's single black cartridge has given us countless pages of texts. We print long text documents, Google Maps, and web pages that all look just fine in black and white.

Another observation we have made over the years is that our friends with color inkjets rarely print anything but black and white. The current move towards reduced printing has also been spurred by the desire to waste less. But even when you absolutely need to print things, we can unscientifically say that most of those prints work great in black and white.

The most beneficial thing we have noticed with monochrome printers has been the cost savings. Back when we had a color inkjet printer we were constantly running out of black cartridges. Those pieces of plastic we wasted and merely threw away requiring us to buy a new one after what only seemed liked 20 pages. Once we moved to a simple monochrome laser jet we began to notice that we could print literally thousands of pages before our toner cartridge went out. And instead of paying $35.00 for a shoddy black inkjet cartridge, that same cash can get us happily printing on our way for over a year.

While you the reader must assume that we live in a house with black and white decor we are not afraid of color. We just derive much more benefit from the attributes of the monochrome laser printer. We are committed to a monochrome laser printer and likely will be for a very long time.

(Top image: Flickr member markhillary licensed for use under Creative Commons)

Comments (5)

I love my monochrome laser printer for many of the reasons you write about, especially the longevity of the toner cartridge. Since we don't print high volume daily the inkjet cartridges would dry out and clog the print heads so we'd have to replace them even though they weren't empty. It just isn't a problem with a laser printer.

any good suggestions of a cost efficient model?

I usually print things at work if i can, it is just so much easier and doesn't cost me a thing. however i am not always at work... We have a couple of inkets at home but there isn't much that i really need high quality printing for (again, if i want anything nice we have amazing inkets at work too) so our printer at home gets used rarely and when it does, it is for stuff that doesn't really matter. We are getting low on ink right now, so that will be another $30 towards it, and i happen to have a $100 gift card to office depot...

My wishlist would include
- toner that isn't too pricey
- wireless
- print quality is decent.

I was thinking about replacing our inkjet with a nicer wireless model, but the real question is "why?"

The printer on the photo is no laserprinter :-] It is an inkjet.

jmorey: I recently smashed my Lexmark POS All-in-One with a baseball bat (Lexmark doesnt seem to think a working paper feed is necessary in their products) and bought a Brother HL-2170W on sale for 99 dollars.

It has Wifi built in, toner is about 60 dollars and can do 1200dpi printing, text is great on this thing. It doesnt do an amazing amount of pages per minute, but for home printing it's great.

I'll second the recommendation for Brother. I bought the same model last spring and *love* it.