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Choice of Printer
It might be interesting to run a printer scoreboard - publish what people tell us about the kinds of printer they have, why they bought it, what aspects of printers they like - and what they hate. Send us an E-mail if you like - printers@mindmachine.co.uk.
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Examples - work in Progress at this time.--
Home Printers - Inkjet
Home users normally have the space and money for only one printer. This suggests one choice - buy an inkjet. Hewlett Packard's colour inkjets have a good track-record. We advise people to look at the several varieties of Epson Stylus, some of Epson's colour inkjets are designed for photographic quality colour output at 5760 dpi, and their printing on special paper is almost indistinguishable from a colour photographic plate.
The main problem with photographic quality inkjet printing is that it is very attractive. Expect to buy a steady stream of ink cartridges and special paper, particularly when the printer is still a new toy. Printer manufacturers sometimes give a price per page - but in brackets it will say "at 5% cover". Remember that covering the page with ink can cost 20 times as much as an ordinary page - and photo quality paper can be 50p per sheet. A glossy A4 print on photo-quality paper can easily cost more than £2 - but it might cost £10 in a high street photo-developer..
Printers as Toys
The world is full of printed information and printed surfaces. Children are not passive consumers - crayon and paint can wind up anywhere. Parents appreciate the rather controlled way an inkjet applies colour to paper. Children appreciate the fact that they can produce genuinely impressive material.
An unfortunate angle of home printing is that shoolwork often gets extra marks for presentation - so presumably Nikon Coolpix 1280 digital cameras and Epson Stylus Photo 740 printers will be preferable to a pencil box. The outcome in five years or so might not be that bad - a boost in skills. There is nothing in a camera or an inkjet printer that means a mass-production childrens workstation couldn't be sold for £100 - one manufacturer already produces a toy that contains the basic parts.
Printers can help children turn ideas into reality - just as they can for adults. Products that aim to be childrens toys -software that outlines origami, iron-on logos for T-shirts - might well be less satisfactory than cutting up photographs printed on overhead transparencies. The problem is cost. If a printed page costs £1 most parents are going to say "leave it alone, it's not a toy".
Small inkjet printers for home use aren't very dangerous. Some printers are directly mains driven, so they are comparable with a casette or video ecorder - or the computer itself. The motors in a small printer are comparable with those in any other motorised toy. Ink pigments and fluid can be assumed to be mildly toxic - comparable to that in fibre pens.
Quality
Inkjet printers will almost always beat laser and dot-matrix as first choice for home use because they don't cost much to buy and can reproduce high quality colour pictures.
An inkjet printer's low cost to make but high print quality depends on the printhead. Printhead manufacture has a lot of similarity to making semiconductors and largely obeys "Moores Law" - so complexity can increase with little impact on price. This allows successive generations of device to have more nozzles, so they can produce more dots per inch, or handle more colours.
Some people talk of "laser printer quality". Because an inkjet printer can have so many nozzles many now produce rather better looking material than laser printers.
Colour and resolution both depend on more nozzles, so inkjet printers will keep on progressing. Printing from a home machine may often give better than you can get from the laser printers at work - but each page will cost more.
Costs
Lower cost printing usually depends on more sophisticated printer mechanisms. For instance, giving an inkjet printer bigger ink-tanks increases the weight of the carriage - so it needs bigger motors and more sophisticated control electronics.
Investing extra to save on consumables is often not worth-while in a home printer. If the payback time on a more sophisticated printer is longer than 2 years it probably is not worthwhile investing the money. The pace of change in inkjet printer design suggests a machine could be obsolete within 2 -3 years.
Printing demands can often be predicted - for instance:
Student driven home use - children printing essays and assignments. A young student might produce two or three six-page essays per week, 40 weeks per year - 720 pages per year. A sub-£200 purchase price is likely to be important, so the printer is likely to be an inkjet with a choice between black or colour cartridge. The price of mono cartridges is likely to tolerated as "essential" but colour cartridges will be seen as a luxury, Users keep the colour cartridge for special occasions. If the price of operating an inkjet printer is 5p per page that is £36 per year for ink cartridges. This is just 1 or 2 cartridges, so remember that in the first year a couple of extras are likely to get used.
Adult driven home use is where at least one adult in the household is involved. Printing could be college assignments, work reports and photographs. If several people are all using the same printer quite heavily then paying extra for a more sophisticated printer with lower running costs might be worthwhile.
Adult involvement relaxes the cost constraints so the printer's price can be allowed to rise towards £300 - both black and colour cartridges can be permanently installed. With 2 or 3 users remember that the price of cartridges is going to rise towards £100 per year - a substantial sum, but still not enough to warrant investing in serious machinery.
SOHO has become one of the printer manufacturers main interests. The soho area of London was once famous for strip joints, but has been gentrified and has become an arts and media cluster. The computer industry uses the term to mean "Small Office / Home Office" - and in some ways it fits the workings of an informal arts based community rather well. People working from home offices aren't amateurs and they want their work to look professional - so very high quality printing is required.
Constraints are lack of money, lack of space and often lack of technical knowledge
Time
In principle inkjet printers could be built for speed, but those made for home use rarely are. Most recent designs claim to output more than 4 pages per minute in colour, and 6 pages per minute in black. Printing is likely to be rather slower with some kinds of graphical image. Many inkjets do not have much by way of a raster image processor, so they may ely on the Windows driver to turn the image into a printable dot-pattern. A recent PC based on a Pentium-IV with 256 Mbytes of memory will handle the print task with no trouble. Older PCs with less memory may slow down very appreciably.
Re-inking
Home users with some technical ability might like to try re-inking cartridges. Be warned, accidental messes will certainly happen. At least innitially, work at the kitchen sink. The benefits are that if re-inking can be made to work well it can provide really low cost printing - the only raw material is liquid ink. We have heard of people printing whole runs of a parish newsletter by re-filling cartridges. On the other hand as engineers repairing printers we have met people who have wrecked perfectly good heads by ill-advised experiment.
I gave up reinking the HP510 cartridges because it was just too much trouble.
Many recent cartridges have a date-stamp and an exhausted flag built into the inkjet chip - so they can't be re-inked. There are kits that promise to reset the internal timers on some chips, but obviously the printer makers try to push these off the market.
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Printers for Work
Most printers are used in a workplace. Printers appropriate for home use often won't be a good choice because a workplace printer is likely to be used much more heavily. A workplace printer might be expected to print several hundred pages in a day - so a considerable investment in educing the cost per page will be worthwhile. There are also several different oles for workplace printers, ranging across:
- the common A4 printer that produces correspondence and reports
- high-speed low operating cost line-printers for printing picking lists and delivery notes
- tally-roll printers that verify transactions at the point of sale
- plotters that produce diagrams, posters, maps and charts.
- cost effective - printers have to cover a range of jobs from the merely "functional" - bar codes and picking lists through to colour brochures used for marketing.
- timely - people can go away and have coffee whilst the printer works, but staff time costs money so when someone presses "print" they don't want to wait for the document.
- reliable - problems with the printer might bring work to a halt. Several workers might be unable to proceed and there will other costs as the problem gets referred to the IT department.
Cost Effective printing is rarely just a matter of "cheap".
Barcodes are a simple example of printing. Barcodes convey no "human impression" because they are not designed to be human readable. It might seem that low cost is the only objective. Practical experience suggests this is sometimes true, so line-printers are sometimes used.
Barcode labels also need to be produced and adhered at a particular point in the production process without error. Scanners have to handle the labels without mis-reading - each number that has to be typed in by hand has a measurable cost. The thermal direct transfer printers used for this kind of job are anything but cheap, typically £300 to £5,000 to buy and more than 1p per label to operate.
The high price of thermal transfer label printers illustrates a key point about business printers - price is sometimes not as important as having something right for the job. The barcode printer's job is measurable because it is part of a production line, and it's price is sustainable because it does a special job.
Ergonomics and Colour
Ergonomics is often less help when dealing with office printers, because they tend to have a range of uses. Cost effective printing is often a matter of communication. The main reason to print a page is person to person communication.
A simple example is the operation of trade credit accounts. Business accounts are a balance between cash-flows and most customers buy on credit. If printing the "Overdue" amount in bold red advances the average payment by a few days the impact on cash flow might be worth several thousand pounds. A fast colour laser printer might cost £2,000 but pay for itself immediately.
Psychological effects are usually less measurable but more important. One of the commonest reasons why software projects go astray is that people don't read reports. Why don't people read reports? Because they are boring.
Workplace communication may not have to be "boring". Colour printer manufacturers suggest that the answer is to use their equipment for pictures and highlighting. Colour will certainly have an impact the first few times it is used, but will the impact be sustained? Adding photographs to a report about storm damage or premature failure of a cog costs very little extra effort using a digital camera. The pictures can be inserted directly into "Word" documents and add to the sense of the text.
Some things are more difficult to illustrate unnless the author increases their invesment in creating the material. The graphics in magazines are often almost menaingless. For instance, these paragraphs on the psychology of communication could be given colour borders and a picture of a head with a flow of "010101" going through the brain. Graphics like this are esting places for the eye rather than information in their own right.
Coloured text has a questionable value as well. Coloured text can easily be provided on web-pages but most do not use it (and where they do it often indicates an excentric viewpoint). Textured backgrounds and side-bars with navigation icons and pictures are used a lot - but it often is not clear what they are adding to the meaning of the text. If everyone is using Microsoft Frontpage's easy highlighting, animated GIFs and textured backgrounds what is being added to communication?
Many Choices, One Solution
Determining the actual cost of printing can be very difficult. Manufacturers will present the case that most favours them, but the "street price" of consumables for mass market items may be very different from RRP. It is difficult to determine the true cost of printing a page. Asessing the psychological impact of a page verges on metaphysics.
It might seem that there ought to be a right answer to business printing needs - but there often isn't. Even with something as straight forward as correspondence printing it is possible to argue that a group of 4 people should:
- each be given individual £230 HP1100 personal printers and pre-printed letterhead. They can drop a sheet of letterhead in when it's needed.
- have network workgroup access to a £1,700 HP5000GN mono laser printer with dual bin feed and letterhead. The printer can select the letterhead bin for the first page.
- have network workgroup access to a £2,000 Milota PagePro Colour laser printer that can print it's own letterhead.
- have network workgroup access to a £15,000 Tally T9140 document preparation machine.
Time is Money
Timely printing is something that bothers home users intermittently - when they try to print a 20 page report just before setting off for a meeting.
In business "time is money", and it is often measurable.
Measuring the time-constraints on an office printer is more difficult. It is generally not a bad idea to assume that when someone presses the "print" button in Windows they need the material before they can go on with what they were doing.
Spending to Save
All sort of assumptions have to be made to come up with the cost of a persons time - wages might be the largest single item, but informal and formal training, management, floorspace and furnishing all play a part. Most workers cost more than 20p per minute - and up to 40p is commonplace. Toner and paper for a 4-page laser- printed report might cost 8p. Staff waiting time for a slow printer will be a minute. The most costly part of printing is staff waiting time.
People vary hugely in price per minute. Get a graphics artist in as a consultant and they might cost £50 per hour - virtually £1 per minute.
The high cost of staff waiting time does not mean that every small group of workers needs a 40 page per minute duplex printing document preparation system costing £15,000. It does imply that such elaborate machines are justified more often than most people think. Some basic calculations to suggest when a document preparation system might be needed can be developed quite easily
Assume that a typists job is to assemble documents from pre-typed paragraphs, with a certain amount of customisation - the sort of task involved in a lot of jobs from conveyancing to preparations of quotes.
The word-processing part of the task takes 8 minutes, waiting for printing then stapling the document takes 2 minutes.
The choice is between an HP5000N and paper trays costing £2,000, or a document preparation system at £15,000 The the latter will save 1 minutes of staff time for each document. The document preparation system needs to save £13,000 of staff time to pay for itself. At 20p per minute this is 65,000 minutes.
If a single typist works for 2,000 hours per year at the task they will handle 12,000 documents, and 12,000 minutes will be inadvertently wasted waiting for the printer and stapling. The document prepartion system will not quite pay for itself within a 5 year "obsolesence horizon".
With two staff the payback time is under three years. With four staff working on the task a £15,000 document preparation system is clearly saving money in under two years.
Of course there may be all sorts of other considerations. The document preparation system is likely to do a neat and consistent job, (some office juniours are a bit erratic). The more expensive machine will cost more to maintain - but it is likely to use bulk toner packs so it could cost less to run. The document preparation system can double up as a photocopier and fax, and that could be a significant saving. On the other hand if it is the only printer and it fails every printing function is down until the engineer calls. The big printer might not be the only one that is ever needed, but if the office handles a continual stream of paper it will pay for itself.
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Reliability
Printing processes are mechanical, so break down is innevitable. The mechanical properties of metals and plastics are so well known to printer manufacturers that they can manage to predict the probability of failure rather well. Items like cars are commonly designed with a life in mind - for instance corrosion can eat through the exhaust pipe a few months after the warranty expires.
Car manufacturers generally have an interest in the vehicle decaying over 7-10 years. Printer consumables generally do wear out in a predicted time. Mechanical assemblies tend to be rated in number of pages or perhaps a duty cycle of so many pages per month. Structure and electronics might last indefinitely.
Printer parts divide into four groups:
Consumables - intended for a life between 1,000 and 15,000 pages and to be user changeable
Engineer changed consumables - longer lasting but with a fairly predictable failure point. Laser printer fusers are commonly rated at somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 pages.
Mechanical assemblies - with lives from 50,000 to a million pages, failing more often as they age
Basic structure and electronics - having an indefinitely long life, barring accidents.
Workplaces vary a lot, but most have IT departments. There is often a site IT specialist, and a corporate Management Information Systems department.
It is probably fair to suggest that in the average IT department no-one is very interested in printers. Unfortunately for IT managers:
- Most businesses are short of IT personnel, so time spent looking at printer problems detracts from other work. Many IT departments are outsourcing software development in various ways - probably at £400-£500 per day. If printer problems detract from other tasks then the
- The average IT department can't do much about printer faults except to confirm them - detailed investigation of mechanisms and spares sourcing is normally beyond their remit.
- IT departments often devise "sensible" policies on what printers to buy - only to find that users and the purchasing department have bought something completely different.
- But IT will often have to look at a problem - if only to decide what is wrong. Printer maintenance contracts don't usually cover inability to select the right drivers under Windows, not knowing how to clean corona wires described in the user manual or change consumables. Calling out an engineer for something not covered by contract is likely to result in a call-out charge - not usually less than £100.
Every time a consumable needs changing users face a potentially unfamiliar problem of what to order and how to change it. There is a probability that someone will phone IT for help.
Low cost printers usually have short-life consumables, a low mean time between failure, and a low total life. This kind of printer may not cost much and may be considered "disposable" - but they may impose quite a lot of load on the IT department.
The answer to the IT department's problems could be long warranty, followed by maintenance contracts. The problem for IT managers is that maintenance companies aren't fools. Maintainers have to be very wary of giving an open-ended commitment. Computer systems are unusual among consumer goods, because they are rarely perfect. Pernickerty users who refuse to accept a problem can cost a fortune - so in the end maintenance contracts put the problem back with the complainant by suggesting there may be a charge for further work. IT has to deal with a complex issue.
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Organisations generally have a mixture of printers. Managers often have personal printers - something like the HP1100 - attached directly to their PC. There are two main reasosn - convenience and privacy.
Convenience is not just a matter of never stretching a managers legs. Managers might expect to work late, and are likely to find the workgroup printers and
Inkjet cartridges generally last less than 1,000 pages.
For workplaces the laser-printer will often be better than an inkjet because the lower running cost clearly more than offsets the purchase price. If a printer is producing 50 pages per day it may well be costing a lot more than £1,000 per year to run.
There is more to a printer's running cost than just the price of the printer and the price of consumables per page. There are potential benefits in saving operator time and improved document appearance.
Laser printers are usually the easiest to operate - some models have little or no control panel, just a power light, they are so straight-forward they need little else
Inkjets can be nearly as straight-forward as laser printers but experience suggest there is more likelihood of cartridges and paper-paths giving trouble.
The saving in time and trouble for operators makes multi-function Printer / Scanner/ Fax machines worthwhile. In principle any computer with a modem can receive faxes, and any computer with a scanner can fax or copy documents. Most people find that faxing and copying using a computer running "Windows" is time consuming and erratic - software can take a scan in and print a page out, but is slower at the job than a fax machine or copier. A multi-function printer is designed to copy and fax with one press of the big green button.
Multi-function inkjet designs intended for small-office / home-office use cost just a few hundred pounds. Incorporating the scanner, printer and modem will save space and look neat - it may even save some money on buying the three items seperately.
The same multi-function idea can be applied to fast departmental printers. The internal technology of laser printers and photocopiers has always been rather similar. Printer and office copier designs are now beginning to converge with the same machine able to print scan and fax. Some large laser printers are capable of fully automatic document production, with multiple paper bins, duplex printing, document colating and stapling. The cost of such machines is considerably greater than that of a basic 20-page per minute laser printer - but if the main purpose of printing is to produce documents it makes sense to have the printer complete the whole exercise.
Justifying the cost of a printer with automatic document production may be simple - it is likely to cost less than a years professional printing of a price list or catalogue.
Organisations usually need several different kinds of printers fulfilling several different roles. The table gives a summary of what printers suit what tasks in condensed form:
| Function | Technology | Typical Models |
| Home correspondence, College Assignments, some colour graphics. | Colour Inkjet | Epson Stylus, HP890 |
| Small business correspondence, some A4 graphics | Inkjet or Small Laser printer | Epson Stylus, HP890. HP5L |
| Small business correspondence and accounts with multi-part paper (Sage, Pegasus, SIMS) | Dot Matrix | Epson LQ2170, Brother 4318. Panasonic KXP36?? |
| Office correspondence etc for a mid-sized network. | 10-20 page per minute laser printer | HP4MV, Kyocera FS1650, Dataproducts 1560 |
| Low cost, low quality printing, for picking lists, delivery notes, low volume invoices etc | Dot Matrix | Brother M4318, Panasonic, Citizen, Star LC10 etc |
| Despatch notes and invoicing for a regional depot. Payroll for large business. | High speed dot matrix | Brother M4318, MT490 ND680, PPI 405, IBM4232 |
| Bar code labels for | ||
| Long-lasting bar code labels | Thermal transfer printer | |
| Box labels, consignment notes etc for major warehouse | Shuttle Printer | Tally 660 or Printronix. IBM4234 |
| Public Utility Billing, Mass mailing. | Bandprinter | Tally, Printronix, Genicom or Fujitsu M304X series |
| Colour printing | Inkjet, Thermal Transfer or Laser | Epson Colour Stylus, Fargo Dye Sublimation. Minolta Colour Page-Pro |
There are printers for all sorts of special purposes
Identity cards and passess. Airline boarding passes. CD-labels. T-shirts.
Another part of this web-site gives information on a huge variety of specific printer models.
Hewlett Packard is the market leader in printers. They identified the switch from dot-matrix to inkjet and laser printers, entered the market early, and have taken a global lead in both technologies.
HP's inkjets are it's own and not sold under other names. Our engineers commonly recommend them to people, even though the profit margin on a sale is often poor. HP inkjets are not cheap, but the margin for retailers is driven down by competition - particularly by stores using them as loss-leaders to attract customers. The purchase price may be low but watch out for the extended warranty pack that the salesman has been told he must sell - that is where the shop intends to make it's profit.
There are two problem areas.
Recent HP cartridges are not easily re-inkable - in fact the 2000C has an expiry date built into the chip. HP have patented the cartridge design to prevent compatible cartridges being produced. We doubt there is much special about the design - the patents serve as a legal obstacle to prevent anyone undercutting HP.
Spares are sometimes unobtainable - HP have decided that some whole printers would be uneconomic to repair so parts are not available. Perhaps an HP engineer in London or New York would define any printer costing less than £300 as uneconomic - but on Tyneside our definition of "economic" allows a bit more labour.
HP laser printers are generally Canon engines. This does mean that many parts of the printer, including consumables, can be Canon. The printer's main logic and it's software are exclusive to Hewlett Packard. For many customers one important aspect is the HPCL print-language.
HP branded laser printer consumables sold at full recommended retail price can be quite expensive - £85 for a 5000 page cartridge (giving HP's claimed 1.7p per page). In practice there are "compatible" designs and refurbished cartridges, so the street price can be very much lower.
The spares position was dreadful in the early '90s - the presumption had to be that HP aimed to keep maintenance to themselves. Canon spares could often be substituted. A few years ago HP started to use third-party spares distributors and the supply of parts for laser printers is now generally quite good. For some reason HP restrict spares in the first year or so of a printers life "because it is under warranty". We get customers who don't want to use the warranty, so this restriction seems illogical.
Canon
Olivetti are (we think) the only inkjet printer manufacturer to say they have made re-inking inkjet cartridges easy, and they deserve some credit for that. Unfortunately our engineers seem to have a low opinion of their printers.
Beware of bargain-basement offers from little-known manufacturers – consumables often cost a lot and may be hard to get in a year or so. Repairs are often impossible because parts are unobtainable.
© Graham Huskinson 2010