Color inkjet printers have been fixtures in most small businesses for many years. They're cheap (under $60 in some cases), last a couple of years and everybody uses them. So they must be the perfect office tools, right? Maybe not.

When you do the math on printing, inkjets may well cost you a whole lot more than you realize.

"What the manufacturers of these printers don't fully explain to consumers is the true cost of ownership of a low-cost color printer," says Jeremy Shulman, vice president of Reink Technology in Tempe, Arizona, a maker of remanufactured ink cartridges under the ABC brand name. "The general rule of thumb is that the cheaper the printer, the more expensive the disposable costs for refills and so on."

While the printers are almost given away, the refills bring in a fortune for the big-printer, original-equipment manufacturers (OEM). According to Lyra Research of Newton, Mass., the cartridge replacement market is now worth $21 billion annually. HP, for example, makes over $10 billion a year from ink cartridge sales, and Lexmark earns over $2 billion from ink supplies, more than half its total revenue.

Shulman gives the example of a Canon i320 Color Bubble Jet Printer. The cost for the hardware can be as little as $55, depending on discounts and where you buy it. The average cost of the ink from Canon is $19 but the yield from that, he says, is a measly 170 pages. Even if you print very little, the cost quickly adds up:

Seven pages a day times 300 days equals 2100 pages — an ink bill of $235.60 per year. If you own the printer for three years, the cost of cartridges comes to over $700 or about 13 times the original cost of the printer. For the Epson Stylus C62, Shulman concludes that the ink bill would be over $1000 for three year's worth of printing.

Of course, seven pages a day is a conservative estimate — some SMBs businesses print a lot more. Let's say your company prints 50 pages a day, 300 days a year. Using the above example, that equates to printing 15,000 pages annually. At that same rate, your annual ink cartridge bill would total $1,596.

And it isn't just cost that conspires against ink jets. They typically don't print pages as fast as laser printers. They can also be a major hassle. It is quite common to be inundated with cartridge-error messages when the cartridges are perfectly fine, or have the machine suddenly go crazy and spit out gobbledygook in an endless stream. The printers are also set up in a way that makes it difficult to minimize the amount of ink they use. It appears they're designed to make you use more ink than you need to with no way to default to "draft quality".

As a result of such factors, the market for laser printers is catching fire. According to Lyra Research, worldwide desktop monochrome (one-color) laser printer shipments grew 15 percent last year to 14.1 million units. More than half of those are what's known as Multi-Function Printers (MFP), which do print, fax, copy and scan. Lyra predicts that over 10 million MFPs will be in circulation by 2008.