Techno-rant: Why a £520 colour laser printer is cheaper than a £199 one. By Simon Hurst

In common (probably) with lots of others I steer well clear of chain stores like pc world, staples, viking and such places - rip off havens in my humble opinion.

So with a view to giving the world some free advice, if you want to find a very good price (probably 15% cheaper than staples) of toner cartridges check out my supplier www,freestonecomms.com

If in doubt, ring em up, say "blame it on Jonathan as he told you to" and I bet that they will not only answer all your queries about pricing, but be cheaper than most and better service to boot.

Jonathan

I appreciate your example of the differences in printing costs for different printers. But these are only 3 printers and there are hundreds, if not thousands...Where can I find the details of the consubables costs for all printers? Interestingly I ask this question in 2 different locations of PC World and one of Comet and got no help at all.

I know we are going off the subject but could Steve enlarge on the way he uses google desktop and Outlook Contact manager?
We already scan to ordinary windows folders and do not keep the paper but maybe Steve has developed on that?

I quite agree that modern units tend to have built in obsolesence. I have a hp laser 4+ bought new in about 1992 - and still pumping out the work. By comparison, until last month I had an Oki 5200n - worked absolutely fine for about 2½ years and now dead to the world. I also have a HP G95 all in one that has not quite died on me yet ... but its now about 7 years old and I can't get any of the consumables other than the printer cartridges - so next time we can't chivvy it through a service will be dead as well.

Incidentally for other Oki users out there, yes you can get compatible cartridges for about 60% of manufacturers prices.

I do have a question for those who know more technical stuff than me ... trying to keep space down means I am considering a colour laser all in one machine. So cut down from separate fax, colour scanner & colour printer to just one machine. And before you ask, no it won't replace my trusty HP4! Needs to be network ready, and what does the community suggest?

Jonathan

PS if anyone wants several sets of leftover Oki 5200 consumables at bargain prices then let me know!

Just like Trevor Scott we purchased an HP colour lasser second hand 3 years ago and subsequently bought the duplex and extra tray. So spent about £400 in all. Now you can spend half that on ebay. THe engineer at our annual service (£79) told me that the new faser printers do not have the quality of the old -it is a HP 4550c.

Toners I buy retail but the cost per copy is negliable so unless you need a super fast machine consider on older HP.

Scanners - we use amongst others a Fijitsu scansnap does duplex both black and white or colour. Ours scans the daily post etc and has had no maintenance for nearly three years

Thanks Phil, even as an accountant (though it's a long time since I was in practice) I have been able to grasp the idea of Total Cost of Ownership for a while. The point I was attempting to make was more to do with the highlighting the things to look for when applying TCO to a laser printer, rather than stumbling across TCO itself as a radical new concept.

If we're going to consider basic concepts that people forget, or choose to ignore, when making purchasing decisions my own favourite would be sunk costs. Though perhaps with the focus on the environment and waste these days, we should be much more conscious of the problems caused by the rapid obsolescence of big lumps of hardware.

It really is very simple but a little time consuming you just need to do the mathematics beyond the retail price of the machine - generally the lower the price the higher the running costs with colour. And now an admission I have never succumbed to a colour printer though sorely tempted. It's the quality and colour of the advice and the client relationship that matters more than the printer.

Secondly - what a great contribution accountants and those advising other printer users would make if they said that the next printer can only be duplex. Let's help the planet and save money. My first ever printer was a Lexmark ( I think this was the trademark IBM put on their printers ) It lasted 20 years and I think it's still going strong at the local Oxfam. It did do duplex but only if you boringly represented the paper the other way round ( after it had cooled down ) and remembered how to tick the right boxes in the Advanced Preferences within Microsoft.

Finally - great printers = HP though Lexmark are veryclose and are always in the reckoning when it comes to Duplex. If we all bought Duplex the manufacturers would be forced to offer the facility.

As to the gentleman with the scanner dislike please please try the Fujitsu - Siemens Fi- 4120c or its more recent brother the Fi- 5120c - what a great little machine - high speed, high volume auto feeder - small footprint, simple paper path and capable of dealing with a hefty daily workload - and then save paper altogether . Once you have sorted the document management software. Once you have sorted electronic storage and back up and restoring capability.

And then you can get a life outside the office...

Unfortunately, as in much of consumer land, you can't use the brand name to differentiate quality any more. Competition has seen to that.

Modern printers simply are not built as well as they used to be and certainly don't last as long. As you've seen in the article the trick at the moment is to con the user into purchasing a printer whose technology is designed to use up expensive consumables, and whose driver software is so sloppily written and bloated that it uses up every last ounce of memory and processor power on your PC. But at least that keeps the cost of the hardware down.

Printer models change at such a pace that reviews can't keep up, and reviewers don't spend enough time with a machine to find out where the supplier's hidden catches are.

Modern HP printers, for example, simply aren't worth the badge. They are cheaply built and underpowered - except at the very high end. Like the article author I had a bit of time for Samsung recently, but they are now playing the consumable game too.

One other printer to throw into the mix is the new Canon LBP5300 which is duplex and network connectable at the same time. It has a decent consumable setup (all-in-one cartridges), but it is too new to discover whether they are playing the chipping game or not.

We too had a Samsung CLP 500 and junked it after no more than one change of toner. The drum went and we wont go cheap again. Does anyone have a view on HP?

Being a very mean lady accountant and wanting little fuss, best value in the true housekeeping tradition, we happened on Oki Laser printers years ago. Fuss fee, drum and toners (including colour) separate and even the men in the practice can manage to change these with very little help. Great value whether mono or colour and a good service with these machines. We still have mono machines some ten years old which work fine, only the PC technology has made one or two obsolete. Definitely worth the trip to see one in action.

I use HP colour laser printers and have done so for many years

I have a 2600n at the moment

The main reason is they are pretty reliable and the parts\toner etc are easy to get - i can't comment if they are more reliable than other brands, but it just sits there and pumps out the stuff as required with a reasonable business quality

Ditch the clunky management software...it's a pain

and try TSI Europe for toner......they are almost half the price of PC world and deliver the next day (no i'm not on commission!)

If we're gonna techno rant, my pet is scanners

They are cr*p whatever brand you try and whatever the cost...how about a comparison and user feedback

I just chucked out a Trust webscan and invested in an HP 7650 with a sheet feeder

So far so good.......it takes 12 ppm and has duplex scanning but i'm wary of bells and whistles cos its more to go wrong. It's a bit on the noisy side tho.

The upside is it's so quick we can do a weeks scanning in an hour and we scan straight to pdf for filing.

Why scan? If you combine Acrobat Pro or Google Desktop, you can index the files and make them searchable and drag and drop the pdf to Outlook tasks for managing queries

Add Outlook Business Contact Manager and you have a full document management and crm system with task lists etc at a fraction of the cost of proprietary software

I use the Panasonic KX-P7105 duplex mono printer.

No problems at all until the drum unit light flashed and warned me of the 20,000 page limit . A (very long ) search on the net came up with the cure - press and hold the PRINT/RESET button for 20 seconds, until a page prints, and this resets the internal counters !!

No problems since.

What Simon Hurst actually did was to understand his document needs and then source a printer that could fulfil those needs. He then made cost comparisons on the basis of TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP!! When I was at Xerox for many years up to a decade ago we sold our solutions on the basis of this concept. Whilst the majority of business owners/managers readily understood this concept of cost comparison, accountants in practice were the ones with most resistance to it. After all why should an accountant listen to a sales person?

Well done Simon, even if a little late in the day. A (free of charge) tip. The same principle can be applied to any purchase. Was it Oscar Wilde that defined a cynic ( he couldn't spell accountant) as someone who understands the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Phil Browne

You are absolutely right to highlight this issue. Our last colour printer was a Xerox phaser 8400, which uses solid ink sticks. A month or so ago the built-in software decided it needed a major service and just disabled the printer. A service will cost more than a new printer. Returning from holiday this week i noticed a new Oki colour laser in reception and the Xerox in the store room with other junk IT equipment.