Nobody enjoys approving a repair on a machine they suspect is finished. The question is usually decided on a feeling — how much trouble the printer has been lately — when it can mostly be decided on arithmetic. Put your figures in and the reasoning is shown alongside the answer, so you can disagree with it.
What Actually Decides It
Three things, in this order. What the repair costs against a replacement — once you are past roughly half the price of new, you are buying most of a machine and getting none of the life. How old it is — the same repair is a good idea at year two and a poor one at year eight. Whether it has failed before — a second fault within a year is the strongest signal of the three, and the one people most often talk themselves out of.
What the Calculator Leaves Out
Running cost, and it is the largest number in the picture. A cheap machine with expensive cartridges will quietly outspend both figures above inside a year. So will one that is too small for your volume and is being asked to do work it was never rated for. Neither shows up in a repair quote, which is exactly why a repair quote is a poor way to make this decision on its own.
The Part We Would Rather You Ask
Send us the model and the quote. Frequently the answer is that the repair is fair and you should take it — we would rather tell you that than sell you a machine you did not need. When the answer is genuinely replacement, we have off-lease refurbished equipment that costs a fraction of new, and if the machine is part of a fleet a service plan usually beats paying for these decisions one at a time.
If the machine is a copier or an MFP rather than a desktop printer, the equivalent question is answered at RDS Team's copier calculator, which sizes a machine to your monthly volume.