About a decade ago, inkjet printers were generally thought of in IT departments in much the same way as pests. They were cheap and cheerful, consumer models that had proliferated so that almost every office had a deskside personal printer and by far the commonest Help Desk calls were about print issues, usually trivial. Consolidating print around higher capacity laser printers and multi-function devices became the orthodox approach and helped to drive the movement towards outsourced managed print. Most in-house IT teams breathed sighs of relief and returned their prime focus to actual ICT even as recession began to erode their numbers anyway.
So when Epson launched the WorkForce Pro range of business inkjets in 2011 there were, shall we say, eyebrows raised in the industry. Last year we launched the next breakthrough: a range of general business inkjet printers using our PrecisionCore technology, previously confined to industrial and commercial print with high performance and quality demands. Today, we are predicting that the future of business printing is inkjet.
Not only that, we believe it is already proving a disruptive technology in business printing. There are broadly two reasons for that. The first is economic — with our Replaceable Ink Pack System of super high yield packs (up to 75,000 pages on one set of consumables), the cost per page is simply a clear winner ahead of anything else in the field.
The second is versatility and performance compared to laser or LED using our proprietary Micro Piezo technology. The range of materials that can be printed on is wide, including for instance textured paper or plasticised surfaces, while colour realism and photo quality maintain the lead that inkjet has always had over laser toner printing. The print resolution can be 2400dpi and even higher. Other potentials include the facility to build printers for a much wider, literally, range of media sizes because there are no particular limitations on the size of the operational printhead.
Speed is another gain, with the first page out up to 3.5 times faster than laser or colour copiers and up to twice as fast as other business inkjets. Independent laboratory tests last year showed also that the Workforce Pro range with PrecisionCore technology required far less human intervention, potentially saving the organisation many hours of labour.
“We are predicting that the future of business printing is inkjet. Not only that, we believe it is already proving a disruptive technology in business printing”
From an environmental point of view, there is almost no comparison. Laser printers and copiers use a combination of heat and pressure to fuse toner to paper. Epson business inkjets use subtle pressure changes to fire tiny ink droplets onto the paper, so they consume minimal energy and then only when printing. Lab tests suggest that our inkjets use up to 82% less energy overall than laser equivalents. There is also less waste, the same comparative lab tests found, in fact just about 5% of that produced by laser devices over longer print runs such as the 80,000 page tests.
So there it is. Inkjet as a new and disruptive force in business printing. Who would have thought?! On the other hand, what Epson has brought to this market is second or third generation advanced technology. It is business class business printing, with a new base standard of cost effective print solutions.
Daniel Rafferty is sales manager of Epson Ireland
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