Braintree High School, like many schools, holds many different forms of technology that serve to make life at BHS much easier. None hold as much importance, however, as the printer, as it functions as the lifeline to almost all work done at any school. Everyday students get packets and worksheets all spawned from the printer, resulting in thousands of papers being printed in BHS daily. Understandably, the price of this is fairly high, ranging from $30,000 to $50,000 each year. Since the printer is such an important part of school life, this can be viewed as a necessary evil for BHS to function. Unfortunately, inkjet printers are siphoning more money than they seem.

A study by researcher Carlos Luso shows that shows that not only does ink almost costs twice as much as blood ($1,500 per gallon versus a whopping $2,700), it shows that much of the ink from cartridges do not actually end up on the printed paper, but rather on maintenance for the printer. Although to the general consumer the amount of ink used for maintenance is unknown, a separate study from Consumer Reports find that many inkjet printers used half of its ink on maintenance rather than any printing. That means a majority of printers are wasting up to $1,850 in ink, and given the amount of printing down at BHS there is a lot of wasted money in a given year. What most schools do not recognize is that they could be saving a lot more money by using laser printers rather than inkjet printers.

Lasers, like most things, makes a product much better to its original counterpart. Laser printers are no exception, costing as little as 1 cent per page compared to the average inkjet printer costing 3 to 5 cents per page. Laser printers print text based documents equally if not better than inkjet printers, but picture quality can be a tad worse. Even so, most school documents are purely text, and even when they have pictures many documents can simply be found online on Google Classroom with its picture at perfect quality, making the only downside of a laser printer practically obsolete in BHS. Laser printers provide the same qualities of inkjet printers at a lower cost, saving BHS money which can be better spent on other parts of the school.

At BHS, you can ask any student and majority of them will complain about the quality of school. Ask the tennis teams and they’ll complain about the 2 benches and 6 courts to split across two 30 person teams. Ask the orchestra or band and they’ll complain about the moldy carpet and the leaking ceiling in their practice room. It is quite clear that BHS needs a fair bit more budget to an environment that everyone can be happy in. Thankfully, we can save that money by switching to laser printers with practically no demerits. With laser printers we can make life at BHS better for everyone, from students to faculty members.