As much as we might aspire to working in a totally paperless environment, real world computing means sooner or later we have to print onto paper. Unfortunately, printers require more moving parts and consumables than any other part of your IT system. Nigel Harris looks at a few ways to control printing costs.
Choose the right technology
Ink jet or laser, right? Well, no actually. There are at least four technologies available to offices of any size:
Inkjet ' cheapest to buy, generally print both black and colour, but they are slow and print quality tends to be the poorest as liquid ink will bleed on standard office paper. However, they are very cheap.
Laser ' at the bottom end of the market you can now buy a mono laser printer for the same price as an inkjet. Print resolution is similar, but output is much faster ' up to six times faster, which can make all the difference in January as you wait for a 25 page Tax Return to print!
Phaser ' not Captain Kirk's weapon of choice, but a variation on the laser for colour printing. The Xerox Phaser printers use solid ink sticks to print colour at twice the resolution and speed of the equivalent laser printer. We bought one instead of a colour laser printer after extensive price comparisons and running cost calculations and we reckon we got a good buy, using it for only occasional colour printing. Our only mistake was not to opt for the duplex version as you can't feed printed paper back through the phaser ' the ink melts on the first side as you print the second!
Photocopier ' Surely not a printer, you say. Take a closer look at your office copier sometime ' if it's fairly new, chances are it will have a parallel printer port, a network card, or a slot to install one of these. Print resolution is only average compared to a good laser printer, but then again it's probably what you produce most of your client documents on, and it's fast. If the copier is sited near one or more PCs why have a laser printer as well?
A quick comparison of typical printer speeds and print resolutions:
HP Business Inkjet 1000 1200 dpi, 3ppm
HP LaserJet 1022 1200 dp1, 18ppm
Xerox Phaser 2400 dpi, 35 ppm
Photocopier 600dpi, up to 20 ppm
Multi-function ' jack of all trades?
These may be acceptable in a home office but are unlikely to be suitable in a professional office. At the lower end of the market they are just plain average ' or worse ' at all four jobs: copying, scanning, faxing and printing. At the top (e.g. the HP CLJ 4730 at £3200) you can get networked, fast, colour laser printer/copiers. But do you really want to use it as a scanner and fax too? When it breaks down you lose four machines all at once.
Scale up and share it out
If you're producing client documents you want the best quality of output possible. In a larger office, the best way to achieve this may to buy a fast, high quality laser printer that can be shared by as many people as possible, rather than spreading your budget over multiple cheaper personal printers. If you need to print on different papers, say letterheads and well as plain paper, you'll need separate paper trays. Tip: secretaries and PAs prefer their own personal printers, so tread carefully here!
Consider consumables
Running costs can be a killer if you make the wrong choice. Not good for the environment maybe, but at the lower end of the market you'll find that the cheapest inkjet and laser printers actually cost LESS than new ink or toner cartridges, making it cheaper to buy a new printer every time you run out of ink!
Ink costs for the examples quoted above are:
HP Business Inkjet 1000 ' 1,750 A4 page black cartridge £21 = 1.2p per page
HP LaserJet 1022 - 2,000 A4 page toner cartridge £46 = 2.3 p per page
Xerox Phaser ' black ink stick 3,000 pages £35 = 1.16p per page (although 3,000 page colour ink sticks ' 3 of them are required ' cost £55 each, so it's an expensive full colour printer)
Photocopier toner with 11,000 sheet capacity costs around £35 = 0.31p per page
Before you buy a printer check the manufacturer's quoted running costs, but try to compare these with a lab-type independent review. A recent budget colour laser printer review in one of the computer monthlies found that printing costs ranged from 1p to 2.4p per page for black output and between 6.3p and 11.9p per page for colour. If you're unlucky to run out of all four toner cartridges at the same time in your HP Color Laserjet 2600n, it will cost you a stunning £249 to refill it, that's £39 more than it cost you in the first place!
With a laser printer, bear in mind that the imaging drum, fuser and maybe the belts will also need changing over time, although some more expensive toner cartridges such as HP have drums combined with the toner cartridge. Budget £115 to £150 if you need to replace these other items in due course.
In a larger office, try to plan your printer acquisitions. If you have six different laser printers, you'll probably want to stock two spare toner cartridges for each costing up to £60 a piece. If you had bought six identical printers you could probably get away with keeping only a couple in stock at any time, or at least you could negotiate a bulk discount!