As colour laser printers have dropped in price, more people have begun to wonder if they’d make a good replacement for their old standby monochrome laser or colour inkjets. If you’re considering trading in your old printer for a brand new colour laser, you’ll be pleased to know that lasers can match the text quality of monochrome units and they definitely offer better value if you’re kind of user who prints a wide variety of documents.
Cost counts
When looking to buy any type of printer, whether you’re a home or business user, you should look at a number of deciding factors; these include speed and print quality, paper handling options, connectivity, management tools and ease of set-up and operation. Most users in this position will put most emphasis on one overriding factor — total cost of ownership over the life time of the printer.
In many small businesses and in the home office, users want to have the luxury of an inkjet printer on their desktop exclusively for their use but this doesn’t make sense for a company when it comes to effectively managing printing costs. One rule should apply in most situations: If you print less that 10 pages per day, then should definitely be using a colour inkjet printer. If your printing output takes you above that, and you intend to print some of your documents in colour, then colour laser is your best option.
Liam Clarke, sales manager for Ireland with colour laser manufacturer Konica Minolta, points out that often when he tries to sell the benefits of colour laser printing to a potential customer, he gets three reasons why they will not invest in one. One, that colour laser is too expensive to buy; two, a colour laser printer is too expensive to run; and three, that a typical model is too big and bulky to fit in a home or small office workspace.
Clarke can provide a strong argument to the contrary in each case. He says in the five years since Konica Minolta launched its first entry-level colour laser printer for IR£1,900 (excl VAT), the printing industry has seen a mini revolution where the price of colour laser has fallen dramatically to the point where it has been halved every 12 to 18 months.
Now colour laser has become very affordable for even the most budget-conscious home worker. A non-networked model with USB and parallel connectivity can be purchased for just €500 — not that much more expensive than a high-end business inkjet printer.
Myths and misnomers
For people to say that a colour laser is too expensive to run is also a misnomer: The relative low cost of consumable media for a colour laser printer makes it a very attractive proposition. Where a toner cartridge is available for €80, you can get up to 4,500 prints from a Konica Minolta 2300 Series printer. With an inkjet where an ink cartridge
retails for €40 for 12ml of ink, you get a 200-page print yield at 5 per cent coverage. It’s a no-brainer to opt for colour laser if you want to print more than 200 pages a month.
The myth that colour laser printers are big, bulky and difficult to transport can also be dispelled. Clarke points out that one of the 2300 Series colour lasers from Konica Minolta is the same in width and length as two PC mini-towers. These entry-level colour lasers now have a svelte form factor that allow them to sit in the middle of a workspace or on a desk comfortably.
While many point to lower cost of ownership over the lifetime of the hardware as the primary reason to opt for colour laser, Clarke also feels that an equally important argument against inkjet has also been overlooked — the durability of a colour laser. He is willing to concede that as with colour lasers, the cost of business inkjet hardware has also fallen. But he also argues that for the typical three-year lifetime of a colour laser, an
inkjet printer doing the same job would have been swapped out and replaced two or maybe even three times in that period. Colour lasers feature better builds than inkjets and that allows them to last the pace of intensive printing for longer.
As stated earlier in the article, if you print less than 10 pages per day then inkjet is the best option. If you need to print in greater quantities, colour laser is the most economical and best quality option. To print 50 pages per day is considered as medium usage and anything above this is considered intensive printing. Less than 10 per cent of all users print intensively and these are the best candidates for the fast, efficient solution that a
networked colour laser printer offers. High printing usage can be seen among estate agents, mortgage advisors, travel agents and finance professionals. These users are especially good at using the printed document as a communication tool.
Cost-effective communication
Distribution companies are also taking advantage of high quality and fast colour printing for better communication with their customers. Clarke cites one example where one of his customers, who sells seeds for rare orchids, uses a colour laser printer to output 500 high quality mail pieces at a cost effective price, which in turn he sends to his customers with details of his products with colour graphics to illustrate them. ‘In distribution, you
have to communicate what your special offer is to the customer,’ says Clarke. ‘Colour laser can help provide your customer with he needs and wants to know.’
The colour laser can offer huge cost and time saving to the worker in the small and home office also. The home worker must produce paper-based documentation and traditionally, these users have had to buy letterheads in large quantities from professional printers to get an affordable price point. Clarke estimates that for a letterhead with a logo and business contact details, a business will pay roughly five to eight cents per sheet for 5000
sheets of paper. Should the business contact details change for any reason, then new letterheads have to be printed again at a considerable cost to the user.
Installing a colour laser in the home office allows the user to print on demand and make changes on individual letterheads and apply different ones to invoices, statements and other business communications. With a colour laser, it is very simple to create and print colour logos and letterheads. The home worker can create a template in Word and using that template, they can get their per page print costs down from at least five cents for
certain quantities to as low as one cent per copy for unlimited quantities. If they change premises or phone number, they can simply edit the template as often as you like with no cost to you.
Taking advantage
The worker in the home or small office is cost-conscious and the good news for them is that to print draft text documents on a colour laser can be up to a third less expensive than with a monochrome laser printer. The colour laser also offers greater variability where workers can print laser labels for sticking on envelopes and colour transparencies for more enthralling business presentations. They can also produce nice glossy documents.
Small and medium-sized businesses are in an even better position than the home worker to take advantage of colour laser. These are organisations with between 10 and 50 employees that are often divided into small workgroups that have evolved from start-up rather than having been strategically planned by the company managers. Often, in these
organisations, according to Clarke, there is no designated IT manager or strategic IT plan.
There is a band aid mix-and-match of inkjet printers from different manufacturers, an old PC acting as a server and it often comes down to one tech-savvy employee within the organisation to make the IT decisions, including the printing ones. It is important that these individuals educate themselves on the productivity and cost benefits of colour laser.
They need to get rid of the older mono laser and colour inkjets on individual desktops and replace them with one or two networked colour laser printers, Clarke argues.
Some commentators have said that colour laser is an expensive option for non–corporate users. With the hardware price below €500 for a non-networked version, this is simply no longer the case. Colour laser offers a fast, efficient method of printing and as each toner cartridge is separate — Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black — each can be swapped out and replaced as they are used up. This is not the case with inkjet where there
is only one scenario where all of the ink in the cartridge can be used up and that is on the condition that user print exclusively in red. It is the industry consensus that it costs 10 cent per page to print with an entry-level colour laser but that is at 20 per cent coverage, based on 5 per cent each of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. In reality, few laser user prints at 20 per cent coverage, most don’t get above 5 per cent in their everyday printing
tasks so in effect when they print web pages, word documents, spreadsheets and e-mail, they rarely go above 5 per cent — so the cost of printing comes down significantly. With colour laser, the typical user gets cost-effective, fast printing. They can print statements, invoices and all of the other mundane documents. But they can also communicate messages to their customers in a much more powerful fashion. As Liam Clarke puts it:
‘The more creative we are with our marketing collateral and distribution, the better we are at communicating with our customers. Many businesses now realise that although having a colour laser printer will never close the deal, it will certainly help make the sale as an assistive tool.’
Colour counts
Home office
Print letterheads for less and users get greater control and flexibility over printing tasks.
SME
Get rid of individual, consumable-hungry colour inkjets and replace them with efficient networked colour lasers.
The networked colour laser has an IP address so it can be remotely maintained by a third party IT support company.
Through its network presence or with a crossover cable to give it one, the colour laser printer can also be interrogated so the owner can estimate the cost of ownership for the device.
Local government
Value for the euro is always the key factor in the public sector. Where high ongoing costs are the burden of inkjet printers and print yields are high, colour laser wins out for cost effectiveness.
Schools
Students have to produce paper — theses, dissertations and reports. Colour laser allows these users to do this cost-effectively in a vibrant fashion.
Konica Minolta colour laser printers
Konica Minolta Magicolor 2300W
A Windows-compatible colour laser printer with a four-pass printing system. It prints 4 pages per minute in colour and 16ppm in black and white. It comes with USB 2.0 and parallel connectivity, but no Ethernet networking support. With a USB splitter, two employees in a small workgroup can use the printer but not at the same time.
Konica Minolta Magicolor 2300DL
Ethernet networked version of the above.
Konica Minolta Magicolor 2350
A4 format graphics printer with print speeds of 4ppm in colour and 16ppm in black and white.
The Konica Minolta Magicolor 3000 Series
Konica Minolta Magicolor 3100
Departmental fast printer with single-pass printing engine for a more robust printing performance. It prints 16ppm in colour and black and white.
Konica Minolta Magicolor 3300
This graphics printer prints 24ppm in colour and black and white, offering auto duplexing and a hefty 256Mbyte of memory.
The Konica Minolta Magicolor 7300 Series
<strong>Koniac Minolta Magicolor 7300
This graphics behemoth prints 21ppm in colour and black and white in A4 format, and 11ppm in A3+ format.
12/07/04
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