Quote:
Originally Posted by ciaran_skye
You might want to look into a laser printer if you'll be printing a lot. [...] If you find the right laser printer you'll be talking about a penny a page in toner and you'll probably spend more on the paper itself.
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I'm sure you know that the cost of printing still depends on the page to be printed. What I was surprised to see was how much dark stuff there actually is in some of the Gurps PDFs which I thought of as "just text pages".
For reliable data, I converted some PDFs to b&w pictures and counted the amount of black in there. About 10% black* seems to be typical, so expect to use about "2 pages of toner" for each page of gurps stuff.
As an example, original toner for my little laser printer (Brother) costs about 2.5 eurocents / average page, so about 5 ct / gurps page. 3rd-party toner costs about half of that, I guess, but I haven't tried those yet. This price range doesn't seem to be that atypical for consumer laser printers, either. Add a bit less than 1 ct for each sheet of paper, and 5 ct / gurps page is definitely breached. (My copy shop charges about 6-7 ct / page, which would give me duplex, which is nice. But they have an additional fee for handling the PDF file so it's definitely not worth for me.)
The biggest realization, though, came when I printed the 250 pages of Gurps Magic and calculated the costs of that (including my failed attempts at manual duplex printing, which cost me about 40 more pages) ... A brandnew softcover would have been a bit more expensive, but not by much.
Keep this in mind when comparing prices. For short PDFs (like the DF series), driving to a print center is probably not worth the gas. For longer books or printing multiple books at once, it might break even because the price per page also drops at these stores when you print a couple of hundred pages at once.
Regards
Ts
* The amount of black in grey areas was not gamma-corrected and I'm not sure which way this would change the results and by how much.