Classroom printer recommendations

We are moving to a new school building (in July ready for September). We have an existing Ricoh copy/printer/scanner which is coming with us and which will be the main printer for colour and b & w printing especially for 10+ copies.

We will be having 5 classrooms and an office which each require their own printer. Again we want the facility to print in b&w or colour, but these will be low-volume printers (for print runs of approx 10 copies or less).

I'm on a hunt to try and fit suitable printers. I'm looking at something not too expensive to buy, thinking around £100 a printer max. Also we need a low-ish TCO - ideally we don't want to be buying 4 x £50 cartridges for these printers every time. The quality of the printouts is not really important either as the Ricoh machine we have does high-quality printing should this be needed.

Can anybody recommend any good makes / models or chip in thoughts on whether inkjet or deskjet would be best?

Has anyone got any recommendations?

If your Ricoh device is on a cost per click system and leased, I would go to that company first. Most take into account how many pages as an organisation you will be doing which reduces the per click cost. It's handy to have features such as scan to email on your devices too and leasing would allow you the chance to do this at a reasonable price.

That's a good point - we have had Ricoh out for quotes on the classroom printers and they have done a cost comparison for a per-click cost vs the traditional purchasing consumables method. The cost for a per-click copy seems quite high (7.44p colour and 1.64p mono) but "high" is quite subjective and based on the price per copy through the main printer/scanner/copier. The cost if we stick to purchasing consumables when needed is 0.06 per copy, either colour or b&w which is a lot less!

We haven't considered leasing these printers at this stage, just buying them outright.

The HP 6500's range is a good option, the cartridges aren't too expensive(even the XL varietys) and provide higher page counts than most ink carts

Currently having a very strange problem with them when printing over the network though - test pages print fine but word documents don't... I'm presuming its a driver issue atm

We've standardised on Brother printers for mono printing and lease our colour - The 6050DN is the printer of choice for the IT classrooms as they are robust, good quality prints and we buy our toner from a company that re-manufactures rather than refills which saves us alot. For offices and smaller classrooms we use the 2150N, very cheap to buy but nowhere near the page yield of the 6050DN but toner is still relatively inexpensive. We have found that the Brother colour laser printers are a little on the pricey side for replacement toners, hence the leasing and pay per sheet on colour prints.

Thanks for those recommendations, I'll take a look at the models and specs and see what costs we can come up with for the toner & related supplies. The ICT Co-ordinator has just added scanners to the wishlist as well ... seems that the new IT curriculum is going to specify that kids need to be able to scan documents .... so we might be looking for multi-function machines now or just buy some scanners as well!. Oh the joys of an ever-changing education system.