we have a Lexmark c500 in the office, about two years old.

The cartridges are by now 5,000 Baht each, black even more expensive (somehow they know that we use mostly black....).

With refills, the print quality suffers a lot, good enough for internal usage, but not acceptable for presentations that you want to hand out to customers.

The idea is buying a new colour laser printer for the documents that we give to customers and using the old one for internal use only. I went to Tukcom yesterday and they have all sorts of printers but what I really like to know is...how many grams of toner are in the cartridge in order to compare the printers. I couldn't care less about the printer price as cheaper running costs will amortize any 2,000 extra for the printer in no time.

Any recommendations?

Very hard to say, for obvious reasons printer manufacturers seem to keep the contents of their cartridges a very well kept secret.

In general, all the budget lasers will be expensive on consumables.

Although 5000 Baht for a cartridge seems to be very steep, I pay less then 3000 for the cartridges of my Epson color laser, and less for the black one instead of more!!! Runs several thousands of mixed black/white and color prints.

Anyway, the printer I have is not on the market anymore.

The funny part is...the guy at IT City showed me some cartridge and it has somewhere "3k" written on it. This stands - hold your breath - for 3 kilogram...the entire cartridge was less than that, but the shop guy was certainly right

Oce has the cheapest toner, however their printers are that expensive that only over a couple of thousand pages per month it becomes worthwhile.

Also I have found out the hard way that with some printers (HP in my case) the ink cartridges supplied with the new printers have much less (about 50%) ink that the cartridges you purchase separately. So you will have to buy a new set of refilled cartridges sooner than you may think or have budgeted for.