New York, NY -- Here at Castle Ink, we strive to provide you with the latest information on printers, printer ink, and their respective technologies. We also like to make sure we cover the full gamut of advice and information so you can make informed choices as a consumer. Joel Shore of Printercomparison.com has put together some tips and tricks to finding the best printer for a business.
The first universal truth when it comes to printers these days is that there are not many bad printers that make it to market. The differences in printers and their perceived quality stems from the ability or failure to appropriately match them to the task(s) at hand. We would be remiss to exclude the idea of cost-benefit analysis when it comes to business printing.
The first task for anyone who wants to assess their printing or is going to invest in a new printer is figuring out the true cost of ownership of that product. This includes not only the printer itself, but the ink, paper, and any other consumables it utilizes. A large number of businesses need only to be able to print high-quality, monochrome documents, some presentation documents, and maybe some photos. A single function color laser printer, such as the HP LaserJet CP2020 retails for $349 and has costs per page of $0.035 for black cartridges (from 3500 pages @ $122.99) and $0.043 (from 2800 pages @ $120.99) for each of its three color cartridges. Contrast that with the Epson Workforce 40, a singlejet function inkjet which retails for $99 and has costs per page $0.051 and $0.043 black and each color respectfully for the highest yield cartridges available.
In addition to the amount of ink used, the type of paper can play a roll in the output quality. Some paper that in manufactured for copiers can not stand up to the amount of ink an inkjet puts onto a page and thus your text can look less crisp. Also, inkjet cartridges almost as a rule do not have the capacity of laser toner, so they will need to be replaced more frequently. Laser toner may be more initially, but overall is more cost efficient than most cartridges.
If you are like most offices, however, you are not likely going to be able to stick with just a single function printer unless you have a good amount of space and you do not already own and are happy with your other machines that copy, scan, or fax. Another factor here is that more and more inkjets have improved there print quality to the point that it is almost indistinguishable from lasers. Kodak, Epson, HP, and Lexmark have high-quality inkjet AIOs at reasonable prices. Lexmark, for example has both a five-printer professional series and a four-printer home office series where the top of the line printer is a mere $300 or less. Many of these multifunction printers also offer separate ink cartridges for each color, making replacing ink a little more palatable. Also, more and more MFP/AIOs are feature things like automatic duplexing as well as wireless or Ethernet connectivity making their placement ability for multiple people to share them easier.
For environments where printing will be more constant or at a high volume, there are also many choices amongst laser MFPs. For what they can do, you can find reasonable functionality at a reasonable price without a terrible amount of difficulty. Almost all of the major players in the printer industry offer multi-function lasers for only a few hundred dollars. More and more of them also now coming with LCDs with graphic menus, a welcome change from the one or two line monochrome displays that were the only option for a while.
Users are also able to find laser printers that are network ready or even wireless right out of the box. For some printers if they are not wireless automatically, for extra dollars there are devices that can be added to make them so. This brings up another point worth mentioning when comparing laser printers to inkjet printers. There are not too many inkjet printers that are expandable either with memory, paper trays, etc, so what you buy is generally what you get. Laser printers on the other hand are more than likely expandable and in addition to network cards you can get larger paper trays, stapler units, internal hard drive space, or memory to name a few. Laser printers are also coming with USB drives located on the front of the machine which will allow direct printing without a PC.
We have talked about features galore, so now let’s turn to the other pressing question at hand: paying for this machine. It is certainly typical amongst businesses to find the money and purchase a printer once and for all. Shore mentions a new model which is gaining some momentum which is pay as you go. Under such agreements, which are also called “‘click charges’”, a business will enter into a long-term deal with a third-party vendor or printer manufacturer which will incorporate maintenance charges into the price. With these plans, manufacturers are able to monitor the printing online and then send a bill to the customer.
This type of model can improve a company’s efficiency and take pressure off of an IT department. Every aspect of print management is outsourced and managed offsite. If your company uses PINs to track printing, all of that activity can be logged and reported back to the appropriate people at your company. When you lease these printers, at the end of the agreement you can simply trade it back in, and then upgrade your system which keeps your technology more up to date than running a printer until it dies.
Another key factor in printing for your business is sustainability. Shore cites an emeritus agricultural economist, John Ikerd, who said that, “sustainability is about meeting the needs of the present without compromising opportunities for the future. Its not just about society and the environment, its also inescapably about economics.” Shore goes on to also cite a poll of Fortune CEOs in which 87% of them stated that sustainability is important to a company’s economics. If a business can change from single-sided to double-sided printing and increase the number of pages they print per sheet, they can dramatically reduce their paper usage and at the same time decrease the amount of the power they consume saving a palpable amount of money.
So, what then, does this all mean? We have established that there are significant differences between home and office printing. It is generally more economical to go with the higher yielding print cartridges to keep your page costs down. Most manufactures offer models geared towards small to medium sized businesses, at reasonable prices. Finally, your monthly printing volume and the features you need should help you determine the appropriate printer for you, whether it be inkjet or laser.
