Costs in Printing at my school

[Dominik_teacher]

Hello everyone

I'm a teacher who works at a primary school in Switzerland. At work I use a printer called "HP Color LaserJet Managed Flow MPF E87660".

For my students I print a lot of documents. Now my headmaster told me that I should stop printing so many colored pages and switch to black/white as much as I can. He argues that printing in colors is 5 times more expensive and has a huge impact on the school budged. 

For me it seems hard to believe that colored copies are 5 times more expensive but I don't know enough about laser printers to really figure out realistiv costs per page for both scenarios (black versus color). I'm also not sure how they count "colored pages". If there is only a small fraction of color on a page that is otherwise filled with black text, that shouldn't increase the costs too much, right? But I think my school only thinks and counts in "black" and "colored", no matter how much color I actually used.  

Could anyone help me with this problem? I don't want to waste school money, but I don't like the idea of handing out too much black and white material to my students, because color can be a motivating factor at this young age. 

Thank you very much in advance!

Dominik 

[Valsimot]

It's more expensive to print in colour, not 5 times more but it is. The print process is not just the amount of each colour toner you consume it's more complicated. 

[Repairatrooper]

As this is a managed device, it was likely sold with a cost per copy contract. Generally the contract will be 1 cent per page or less for monochrome and color pages can be anywhere up to 8 cents a page so color pages costing 5x as much is probably pretty accurate. And any color at all on a page gets billed as color even if that color is only 1 percent of page coverage. Those contracts also often state a maximum number of color prints allowed before an even higher rate kicks in.