One of the main ongoing costs of running a computer system is buying printer consumables - laser and inkjet cartridges,
The cost of running an ordinary printer can be anywhere between 0.1p and over 10.0p per page. Very low operating costs are usually achieved by impact printers - bandprinters and dot-matrix machines. The operating cost for most mono laser and inkjet printers is 1 - 2 p per page of A4 text. Colour printing is in the range 2 - 4 p per page. Costs can rise very steeply if pages have a stong graphical content, which tends to give high page cover. A full colour photograph from an inkjet printer can easily cost more than £1, which may seem exhorbitant but is cheaper than the same page on photographic media.
Workgroup laser printers quite commonly produce 5,000 pages of output a month
- a group of 5 typists each producing 50 pages per day -
- a group of 5 researchers will often print out material anging from 2 to 200 sides to read it.
With a 70-fold difference in operating costs for common printers it is possible for large organisations to save millions of pounds by using the right printer for each task.
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A printer’s lifetime costs need to be considered, not just it’s purchase price.
The total costs of printing can be difficult to assess, but they should include:
| Purchase price of the printer itself - including paper trays and interfaces. Printer buyers tend to concentrate on the "big item" and choose a printer, then add on all the other bits they need. The cost of an Ethernet Interface can easily be 1/3rd the price of a printer - so can a duplex handler. Advanced document handling - collating trays and stapling - can cost more than the basic printer itself. |
| Consumable cost and life - ink cartridges, ribbons, printheads, toners, developers and drums. This is where almost all printer manufacturers make their money. Many sites have a lot of different types of printers and stocking all the consumables is a significant logistical problem. When a printer manufacturer quotes how many pages a cartridge should produce they generally mean with 5% of the page inked. |
| Cost of paper - including whether it needs to be to a particular specification and the overprinting costs of material like letterhead paper. Laser printers are generally fed with low cost photocopy paper - but there is a 3-fold price difference between bulk unbranded paper and "brandname" supplies. Supermarket paper can be amongst the cheapest - and good quality Inkjets can usually be fed photocopy paper, recent papers usually have a suitable surface. Special inkjet paper may gives better looking colour images - and some people still like a glossy finish which they are used to with photographs. Computer printing of short runs below a thousand copies can be significantly cheaper than professional printing. "White paper offices" aim to use computer printers for all their output instead of buying letterhead. |
| Print volumes – range from under 100 pages a month for home users and some executive offices - to 10,000 a month on office workgroup machines and 250,000 per month on bulk production printers used in corporate billing department. Low cost printers are often built for an output of a few hundred pages per day and attempting to run the printer for longer will overheat components, wear out bearings and exhaust the lubricants. A low-cost printer asked to print 3,000 pages once per month will probably give trouble - even if it does very little at other times. Workgroup printers are more likley to be designed for continuous use. |
| Colour requirement– all printer technologies can manage some sort of colour printing – at least in principle. Inkjet printers have a clear advantage in terms of printer cost because the extra circuitry costs very little and all the extra works are in the cartridge - which is a disposable consumable. Inkjet colour cartridges often have a very short life. If colour printing is a regular equirement then laser printers give a lower cost per page - the material costs less and they give acceptable results without special paper. If print is a regular requirement but colour is intermittently useful then it may be sensible to have a reasonably fast duplex "workgroup" mono laser and a colour inkjet. |
| Multi- copy requirements – only impact printers can produce multiple copies with one pass of the printhead - but it does require multi-part paper which can be expensive. Of course it is possible to send three copies to a laser or inkjet - but it will then print at 1/3rd the speed. There is no forensically verifiable test that three successive pages are truly identical. |
| Special paper requirements. Some people really like A3's ability to communicate a lot of imformation - for spreadsheets and maps for instance. A3 printers cost a bit extra because the print path needs to be 11 inches wide. A0 printers or "plotters" are in a completely different price class. An A0 plotter may be a inkjet with wide metalwork, but it will cost 20 times as much. Expect to pay a lot extra for essential "accessories" like the stand and rear feed rollers. |
| Paper cover – standard text covers only 5-7% of the paper with ink. Printing white on black covers 95% and the ink will therefore cost nearly 20 times as much. Printing any page with solid colour typically mixes two inks and may well cost double again. If a page of text from an inkjet printer costs 3p expect a full A4 page photograph to cost between 60p and £1.20. It may still be cheaper than professional photographic printing. |
| Electricity consumption – large laser printers typically consume half a kilowatt intermittently and about 100 Watts on average (about 10 –20 p per day). Printers with power saving standby modes may drop power consumption to under a watt, but may also use significantly more. Inkjets generally consume less power - they don't have a hot fuser or a heavy gear-chain to run. Standby running costs might be similar. |
| Maintenance costs – including the nature of warranty and potential losses due to printer down-time. If a printer is intended for serious use then the rather lacadaisical esponses under a standard warranty probably aren't good enough. Maintenance contracts can be tricky - for instance fusers are usually counted as "consumables". In fact nearly everything that could go wrong in a laser-printer might count as consumable - so you might wonder what the purpose of the contract is. |
| Expected life of the printer. Computers are made obsolete by "Moore's Law" progress and this does effect printers - but less dramatically. Most low-cost printers will be technically obsolete in 5 years because a new machine would give more options: -higher speed, better picture reproduction - perhaps even lower operating cost. Printer construction for the low-cost market tends to involve a lot of plastic and this suggests early obsolescence. More robust "workgroup" printers can last longer. Of course technicians can fix almost any printer - if they can get parts. Some manufacturers severely limit the range of spares and the time they are available.The logistics of handling spares is genuinely complex and expensive, but manufacturers policies differ. |
| Document appearance benefits. Some documents are high profile – sales material and quotations need to create a good impression. Other material is just part of the business process- delivery notes, invoices, purchase orders – most businesses would judge it to be poor taste to send these on letterhead – but they may be spending as much sending pre-printed multi-part forms. Some business try to stick to white-paper forms. |
There is a problem with all this if you are thinking about buying a printer. Some questions are not easy to answer - in fact printer sales sites often don't even state what cartridge a machine takes. You might almost suspect that printer makers don't want buyers to know how much their machines will cost to run.
A few years ago Kyocera ran a high profile campaign on print costs and consumeable use. Kyocera were promoting their "Ecosys" range and particularly its amorphous silicon drums with a "liftetime warranty". Raising the issue of print costs caused a certain amount of indignant denial among other printer makers saying that "lifetime costs" for the Kyocera machines would prove less satisfactory. Unfortunately they were proved right - the new design proved unduly failure prone.
All The Same
One response to a long list like that above is to say: "Well all manufacturers must be pretty much the same, otherwise they couldn't survive in the market."
We don't think this is true.
For instance, in UK computer magazines it is fairly easy to find a 20% price-spread on exactly the same product delivered mail-order by box-shippers. A price -spread between dealers would be understandable, they might offer different levels of knowledge, commitment and experience in helping the choice, installation, first-line warranty cover, long term maintenance etc etc. Box-shippers all offer a rather similar service. This suggests that a lot of buyers don't even bother to look around. Most businesses don't buy very many printers, and the honest truth may be that many people aren't very careful about what they buy. Printers can be boring.
If there is room for a 20% price spread on identical products then there is much more variation between similar products. There is one very large printer makers - about 5 significant others and about 20 large printer manufacturers.
All the big makers try to have a product for every market niche. A company like Hewlett Packard, Epson or Xerox needs to do this so that corporate IT departments can make an invariant rule like "buy Xerox".
Corporates love rules and printers are an attractive area for rule-making. People can point to the large total expenditure, the complexity of consumeable stock, the time wasted in fixing minor faults and the money wasted on innapropriate use.
It is unlikely that any one supplier is good across the board. Like any manufacturing process there are all sorts of scale economies in R&D, manufacturing, sales and distribution to be taken into account - as well as some real innovations in design. Most support workers would also agree that some printer makers simply seem to show more talent - they generally make better value printers. However it can be very difficult to make an informed decision. If you mainly deal with one make of printer then that brands characteristics - support, consumables, spares costs all become familiar. Other printers seem wierd - so there is no such thing as unbiased opinion.
There may be a case for the one-brand rule. If the printer maker sticks to a few designs of consumeable, gives low prices and long term support. In practice that is rarely likely to be the case. In fact it is difficult to assess value for money. Printer prices genarally fall so a contract that guarantees low prices on day one is likely to be guaranteeing high prices a year or so later.
Published prices are not necessarily a guide to real prices.
Corporates tend to get their printers on rather different terms to others - special deals on prices and consumables. This might be worth remembering if you'r buying a home printer. The fact that the office is full of HP or Xerox doesn't mean that it's a great buy for home. It may mean you can nick the consumeables - which appears to be at the heart of some buying decisions.
The street price of consumables can be different to any published list. It is not unknown for a corporate to negoatiate what they think is a special deal - but actually pay more that the supermarket price.
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SMEs
Corporates are less than half of the print market. Small businesses commonly rely on external support from dealers and software houses. Curiously the brand of printer is often different on small sites. Sites set up and un by a software house are much more liklely to have Kyocera, Brother, Oki or Tally printers. The reason seems to be that these brands allow a dealer margin, the customer can't so easily find an identical machine for £100 less in a magazine.
Smaller organisations may not have the space or budget for several printers, but a badly chosen printer can impose unnecessary unning costs. Buying an extra printer – having both a colour inkjet and a mono laser – may save money within a year.
Every computer user really need two printers. Printers are failure-prone. A computer without a printer is often rather useless. The truth is, a lot of computer networks are little more than a very flexible collection of high-price typewriters. Printer eliability is an important issue.
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Home and "SOHO" computer users are the single biggest market now. Almost anyone with a home computer (more than half the population) or even just with a digital camera (growing to near universal) wants a printer.
Some users appear to be almost oblivious to anything but purchase price so there have literally been examples where a printer and cartridge sell for less than the price of a cartridge. Users tend to say "well I'll throw the printer away" - ignoring the fact that a £55 inkjet cartridge is likely to be extremely bad value even if you do get a free printer! And of course the printer design will change in a year, yes you can get another cheap new printer but it might not install happily alongside the old drivers. It's probably better to pay a bit more for the printer and get a lower cartridge price.
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Recommendations
In the light of all the above and years of experience are we going to ecommend a brand? OK -
Hewlett Packard
Why?
Range - with a few small exceptions they make something for just about every "office" niche. Most of their designs are quite good. There are some special niches like thermal transfer plotters and vinyl cutters where they don't compete.
Consumable supply. Because their printers are common there is competition in consumable supply so they tend to be easy to get and not too expensive.
Ease of use. With a few exceptions people seem to find HPs designs easonably approachable - they manage to change cartridges without too many disasters.
Drivers. HPs printer drivers generally work well. For most people this means the Windows driver. From what we can tell, most if not all HP drivers are written by Microsoft. Perhaps because HP-PCL has become a standard the Linux drivers work as well.
Spares. Perhaps simply because they are number-one printer maker there are generally some spares available. Spares availability and price isn't great - but at least there is some supply.
A big reservation for us is that we don't make any money out of saying it. There is so much competition amongst box shippers we don't currently sell new HP printers. We do sell some consumeables and second hand HP printers - but we sell other brands as well.
Consumable price - HP tend to come out with slippery phrases like "value for money" but when the computer division makes a loss the printer division can afford to bail it out. Critics with an eye to share price wish HP would ditch computer making and focus on printers.
Environment - HP pioneered the disposable cartridge. Like all printer makers they claim they are recycling - in big factories where the cost of the exercise must be in doubt. HP are not alone in engineering their catridges to be difficult to recycle locally - but they do it too.
Spares - HP spares are generally available for laser printers - but this is largely because they don't make the print-engine and because theres a big second-hand market. For inkjet printers if there are any spares available the prices are ridiculous.
Sheer Scale - HP are like most other big printer makers in taking an attitude that ranges from dismissive to hostile to small companies like ours. They are no worse than most.
Unreserved endorsement of HP wouldn't make sense. Since HP has been the largest printer maker for over 15 years we might naturally hope to see more competition from the smaller guys in the form of better products or prices. HP's specifications might act as a baseline for others to exceeed.
Notes and Other makes:
Epson's inkjet printers deserve a mention. If you want photo-quality inkjet printing with the potential for low cost then their piezo-electric printhead design can be preferable.