Why I Talk Most People Out of Buying a Printer (and When I Don't)

Most printer decisions start from the wrong question

If you work in a company with more than a hundred people, someone like me approves the printer orders. I'm the office administrator who signs off on the hardware, ink, and paper—roughly $45,000 in annual purchasing across a dozen vendors. I report to both operations and finance, which means I hear about it from two directions when a purchase goes wrong.

The way I see it, most teams ask the wrong question when they buy a printer. They ask "which machine should we get?" when they should be asking "what are we actually printing each month?"

So here's my opinion, and I'm going to be direct about it: stop buying printers based on sticker price or spec sheets. Do the cost-per-page math first, match the machine to the volume, and if the numbers don't work—don't buy it. The most honest purchasing decision is often the one that doesn't happen at all.

I've been managing this for five years. I've made the mistakes myself. Let me show you what I mean.

How the Epson 2750 changed my math on ink

The most common request I get is "can we order a standard printer for our office?" Usually the person has already picked an epson 2750 printer—it's a popular EcoTank model—or something similar. And that's honestly not a bad default. The 2750 is quiet, reliable, and easy to set up. But before I order any machine, I now always ask one question: how many pages per month?

Here's the experience that turned me into a skeptic. In 2021 I bought a cartridge-based inkjet printer because it was $70 cheaper than the EcoTank equivalent. I saved $70 on paper that day. By month four, we had spent $240 on replacement cartridges—at roughly 150 pages per week, with a mix of black and color. I had fallen into the exact penny-wise, pound-foolish trap I now warn every manager about.

The epson printer ink replacement system is completely different arithmetic. Instead of swapping cartridges, you buy four bottles of ink—black, cyan, magenta, yellow. A full set runs around $40 to $60 depending on the retailer, and Epson's published yields put the black bottle around 6,000 pages with the color bottles around 6,500. Compare that with a cartridge printer where you're paying $60 for maybe 1,500 pages of black ink, and the per-page cost is maybe five to eight times higher.

What I mean is that the sticker price is the least interesting number on the invoice. The cost per page, the ink yield, and the actual monthly volume are what determine whether a printer is cheap or expensive. If you print 500 color pages a month, a cartridge machine could cost you $80 a month in ink alone, while the EcoTank route would be more like $10 to $15. The 2750's higher upfront cost pays for itself in a few months at that volume.

Granted, the EcoTank isn't for everyone. If you print fewer than 50 pages a month, a cartridge printer is perfectly fine—the machine cost matters more than the ink premium. And if you rarely print in color, the savings shrink. I'd argue the 2750 is the right call at roughly 200+ pages a month, especially with color work. That's not a marketing line, that's just the break-even math.

DTF or DTG printer? My answer is usually neither

Then there are the specialty requests—the ones that arrive with a YouTube video attached.

A couple of times a year, someone in marketing or events asks me about garment printing. They've watched videos comparing a dtf or dtg printer, and they want us to produce branded shirts in-house. In 2023, an event coordinator asked me to buy a calca dtf printer with a heat press and powder shaker. The total setup was about $3,800.

I went back and forth on that one for two weeks. The direct-to-film route had real appeal: no garment pretreating, works on polyester, and the per-shirt supply cost was roughly $3.50 compared to the $14 our local decorator charged. On paper, the savings were obvious.

But then I started counting everything that wasn't on the quote. Learning time. Failed transfers. Color calibration. Floor space. And the uncomfortable fact that we'd print maybe forty shirts a month. At that volume, the equipment cost alone was the equivalent of paying the decorator's margin for more than a year—and that's before considering labor.

It also mattered that hitting consistent color on low-cost DTF equipment is genuinely hard. Industry standard for brand-critical color is a Delta E of under 2, and the Pantone Color Matching System guidelines are blunt about how much can go wrong. A cheap DTF printer is capable of good results, but it takes reps. We didn't have the reps.

Industry standard color tolerance is Delta E < 2 for brand-critical colors. Delta E of 2–4 is noticeable to trained observers; above 4 is visible to most people.

The one time I did feel real time pressure was when a VP walked into my office on a Tuesday and needed 200 branded hoodies by Friday. I had two hours to decide between renting a DTG printer, buying a heat press, or calling our decorator. In hindsight, I should have pushed back on the timeline. But with the deadline looming, I went with the vendor we already knew and trusted. It was the right call—and it reinforced exactly why I keep the volume framework in mind for every dtf or dtg printer debate:

• DTF (direct-to-film) is the better choice for small-run decorators: no pretreatment, works well on polyester and blends.
• DTG (direct-to-garment) excels on dark cotton shirts with a soft hand-feel, but the maintenance math gets ugly at low volume.
• Below roughly 50 shirts a week, outsource it. Equipment cost, labor, and failed prints will eat whatever margin you thought you were saving.

If you're a real apparel business printing at higher volume, a calca dtf printer can absolutely be a workhorse. I know small shops that pay off the investment in six months of steady orders. But they bought the machine because they already had customers with recurring demand. They didn't buy it to invent demand.

The UV printer 9060 request that taught me the limits

Last year, one of our senior engineers asked for a UV printer 9060—a flatbed machine with a roughly 60 by 90 centimeter bed, used for printing on rigid surfaces like metal, glass, and acrylic. He'd watched a video of someone printing logos onto custom enclosures and coffee mugs. It's a genuinely compelling piece of equipment.

The numbers were tempting. A decent 9060-class machine with starter inks ran in the $15,000 to $25,000 range. The engineer produced a business case with $6,000 a year in avoided outsourcing costs—custom panels, labels, and housing parts we currently bought from a fabrication shop. Payback in three to four years. It was tight but defensible.

Where the case fell apart was total cost of ownership. Printheads are consumables on UV machines and cost hundreds of dollars each, usually replaced as a set. UV-curable inks expire. The machine needs stable temperature, ventilation, and floor space. And the skill curve for color matching—again, aiming for that Delta E standard—is real. The engineer was confident he could learn it. I didn't doubt him. I doubted the utilization: we'd run that machine maybe two hours a week. An industrial UV printer earns its keep at twenty-plus hours a week, not two.

So I did the thing that sounds counterintuitive: I told him we should outsource the work, even though the three-year outsourcing cost ($28,800) is higher than the machine's purchase price. Because the machine's total cost includes operator time, maintenance, floor space, spoiled materials, and the very real risk of it sitting idle for half a year. The local fabrication shop charges us $800 a month, delivers on time, and takes zero of my team's hours.

To be fair, that decision isn't right for every business. If you're running a product company with steady demand for custom rigid prints, a UV printer 9060 is a legitimate production asset. I would never tell a real print shop to skip one. But a general office wanting the occasional branded acrylic sign? That's what suppliers are for.

The "but my friend made money" objection

I get pushback sometimes. "My cousin bought a small DTG printer and it paid for itself in a year." "I found a cheap epson printer deal and it worked fine." Fair enough—those stories are real. I've seen them too.

The pattern I've noticed in every success story is that the buyer already had the customer before they bought the machine. They had a shop full of regulars asking for printed gear. They had a corporate client with a standing order. The printer was bought to fulfill demand, not to generate it. When people buy equipment hoping the equipment will create the demand on its own, that's when the machine ends up dusty in the corner. That's the honest limitation, and it applies to everything from a $300 office printer to a $20,000 flatbed.

So here's my practical framework after five years of approving purchase orders:

• Under 50 pages per month: Buy a basic cartridge printer. The ink premium won't hurt at that volume.
• 200+ pages per month, or lots of color: Get an Epson EcoTank—the epson 2750 printer is a solid starting point. The epson printer ink replacement bottles are where you save real money.
• Specialty equipment (DTF, DTG, UV): If you can't name paying customers for the machine's output this month, outsource the work instead.

Bottom line: the best printer is the one you barely notice. The best purchasing decision is the one that never makes it into a quarterly review as a mistake. And if you ask me, the most valuable thing I can say to a manager with a brochure in their hand is sometimes the hardest one: "you don't need this yet."