Dodgy Facts: Resolution, Speed, Reliability and Cost

Printers are pieces of hardware, there ought to be objective ways to describe what they do. Motors turn, lasers flash and a page emerges. It takes a while to produce a page, it might take longer if high resolution is required.

There are some problems:

What we really want to know is the value of printing, how much better people understand things from a page printed on one printer, as against a page being printed on another, compared with viewing things on a screen.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is more knowable. This is a combination of purchase price, consumables, hidden consumables like special paper, fusers and ETBs. reliability, time wasted talking to technical support and repair cost. If you are a "corporate" there's an element of how many calls you get.

Another problem with printers is to distinguish what the hardware can really do from what might be claimed for it when it is enhanced by software.

Whether a printer can handle colour is (usually) a simple objective fact. Most inkjets can handle colour.   (Dot matrix printer often proclaimed they could, but user acceptance required a sense of humour).

Multifunction scanner/printers may be able to copy documents - but the other things they might do such as enlarge, reduce, fax, email, copy to file, deal with books, auto-feed and handle double-sided sources make things more complicated.

After the decision as to whether to buy a colour or multifunction printer, the next deciding factors might be print resolution and speed. The problem is that the printer makers know it and have a bit of a tendency to distort things.

Resolution

Resolution figures might be given as an objective fact. If the printer has so many nozzles in its printhead or a particular type of laser scanner, then it has a top limit for resolution and that is   a gauge of the quality the machine can produce.   Perhaps manufacturers don't like plain figures.   Most manufacturers headline the apparent resolution given by a Resolution Enhancement Technology (RET). They can argue that print quality is subjective and if colour is involved it depends on ink and paper qualityLink to this pages section on resolution .

Speed

Print speeds given for laser printers usually have some relation to what users will experience. Marketing departments seem to lose grip on reality when giving print speeds for inkjets. Most inkjets scan a small printhead across a page and doing that takes time. Printers can trade resolution against speed; slowing the machine to half-speed allows double the resolution. Some laser printers do just that, slowing down to half speed to produce their highest quality output. Inkjets do this over a much wider range. People might see 30 pages per minute from a consumer inkjet in a dubious draft mode but less than a page per minute in photographic mode.  Given the price of ink and special paper, users probably wouldn't want the printer to work too quickly. If a printer will be doing something time-critical like printing photos while customers wait read the small print. Link to this pages section on print speed

We try to give objective figures for speed and resolution on the printer research pages.

Reliability

Some things we would like to give figures for we can't currently determine:

Reliability is important. Manufacturers and their warranty maintainers obviously do have figures by brand and model on warranty and service contract failure rates but they don't release them. The US magazine PC World does an annual survey by brand with tens of thousands of participants.Link to pcworld.com reliability survey  Otherwise   there is lots of anecdotal evidence on the web but not too many statistics on printer reliability. The true reliability of printers emerges years after they were made - so people still use and remark on the reliability of the HP 4000 - 12 years after the product launched and 10 years after it was replaced by the LJ 4100.

Manufacturers do give some surrogate measures for reliability - see duty cycle below. Link to this pages section on duty cycle

We could open a "forum" but there are probably enough of those. An angle we might explore to get reliability and satisfaction measures would be semantic analysis of web content.   At the moment it's just an idea.

Cost of Ownership

Cost of ownership would be the rational way to decide on business printers.   On any one day it is fairly easy to get costs for a couple of models and magazine reviews can be helpful. Unfortunately printer prices can easily change by 20%   overnight and so can the price of the consumables. There is a suspicion that manufacturers sometimes keep the price of cartridges down whilst selling a printer then raise them in the after market stage. The control over what printer vendors do with cartridge prices is what their competitors, compatible makers and recyclers are doing.  The printer market is competitive but there are flaws in the competition.   Buy a printer and commit to buying cartridges. Link to page about Printing Costs

Objective Facts

We try to keep things simple and objective in the points below but that is an aim, not a promise. If a manufacturer says "print in colour for the same price as black and white" (Xerox Phaser, Ricoh Gelsprinter, HP CP3525) they might mean it. Colour toner doesn't necessarily cost more than black. More ink doesn't necessarily mean a more expensive print job. It might be difficult to tell,  colour print jobs are usually quite different in character from their mono equivalents.Link to this pages section on costs of colour

Sales literature isn't always helpful. Laser printer ads don't usually mention the life expectancy or cost of the fuser and the transfer belt. Manufacturers have the American habit of producing knocking copy about each others' products but there seems to be a gentleman's agreement to avoid too much competition on price in the consumer market. Kyocera and Kodak have tried direct competition on consumable prices but it hasn't worked all that well. Buyers are sceptical about claims in a market they sense is rigged against them.

Brand Loyalty

Most office workers and students have daily encounters with printers. Their buying decisions probably depend more on their past experiences of the brand than anything else. This has curious effects because people might be buying home inkjets based on experience of the office laser printer and vice versa. Decisions are based on reputations made by models that are no longer available and vendor policies on spares and repairs that might have changed.