TCPglobal - news, views and issues on total cost of printing

Issue #0617/1 - Less is more with the new colour laser printer from Hewlett-Packard. It is the least expensive machine in the group to buy but very nearly the most expensive to run. Therefore, it is most likely to prove popular with sophisticated, but low-volume, colour users where purchase price is paramount.

Colour is still a major growth opportunity for printer manufacturers, with Hewlett-Packard managing to ship 38% more colour laser printers in its last quarter than a year ago (fiscal Q2, Feb/March/April). Furthermore, it is still the low end of the market that is driving this growth.

Although growth is slowing, as the price of colour laser printers continues to fall, they become attractive to customers who would previously have only considered buying an inkjet printer for office colour work because of the high purchase price on colour laser.

Now, however, colour laser is a more attractive proposition for office colour (still considered to be the holy grail of office printing) and as a general-purpose printer for both mono and colour printing in the office. As competition, and therefore pricing, remains aggressive, customers are more and more inclined to take the plunge and replace an old mono printer with a new colour laser printer.

In its Colour LaserJet range, Hewlett-Packard wants to do more than simply provide a colour solution to replace a mono solution. Rather, the desire is to offer high quality, colour consistency, functionality and productivity right from the bottom of the range to the top.

Hewlett-Packard
Colour LaserJet 1600

Avoiding the use of a transfer drum or belt, the only other part of the machine susceptible to wear and tear is the paper transport mechanism and this can last the life of the machine. Overall, the result is that the only supplies that need changing are the single-piece toner units -fewer items to replace periodically, meaning fewer interventions.

There are no colour laser printers other than those from Hewlett-Packard with only four supplies units to change. Indeed the Oki C3200 has no less than 10 units to keep an eye on!

Doubtless it is the direct-to-page configuration that restricts print speed, caused by the need to run the paper slowly through the mechanism in order to ensure accurate colour registration of the image on the paper from each of the four drums. By contrast, a printer that creates the image on a transfer roller or belt is capable of faster print speeds because the drum and roller units are tightly registered and coordinated with each other at all times.

Hewlett-Packard
Colour LaserJet 2605

So, the result is that the speed rating of the new CLJ 1600 and 2605 printers is considerably lower than any other single-pass machine. They are rated at speeds of just 8ppm in mono and colour (Colour LaserJet 1600) and 12ppm/10ppm mono/colour (Colour LaserJet 2605).

We referred to the fact that colour laser is still the holy grail of office printing. Taking this one stage further, single-pass technology is perceived to be the superior technology over four-pass – but the distinction and value proposition has become confused in the last year or so.

Consider some of the other printers in, or near, the market segment of the CLJ 1600 and 2605. Although single-pass engines are now competing aggressively on price with four-pass engines, these particular single-pass engines are not necessarily giving the perceived advantage in terms of speed.

For instance, most of the four-pass machines are rated at 5ppm in colour and 20ppm or 25ppm in mono. True, these are slower at printing colour pages but, for an office where this is the only printer and mono pages comprise an important part of the office printing function, 20ppm or 25ppm is a considerable improvement over 8ppm or 12ppm.

To go one stage further, there are two four-pass machines on the market, priced not so far from the entry-level, that offer comparable colour print speed to the CLJ 1600. These are the Brother HL-2700CN, Epson AcuLaser C2600N and Lexmark C510n. And, these printers offer 30ppm mono printing as well as 8ppm (Epson 7.5ppm) colour printing.

Can we not claim, then, that these four-pass printers actually offer the single-printer office better value for money as a purchase than a single-pass printer where mono print speeds are restrained to 8ppm along with the colour print speed?

Because the CLJ 1600 and 2605 are based on the same engine, which is the same engine as the CLJ 2600, the toner cartridges are the same for all machines – always helpful. Black toner is rated at 2,500 pages and colour cartridges at 2,000 pages.

At this point we must draw attention to the fact that Hewlett-Packard has always been very scathing of other manufacturers for shipping printers with ‘starter’ toner cartridges that offer half, or less than half, the number of pages offered by the aftermarket cartridges. Yet, here we find Hewlett-Packard itself doing just that itself.

As mentioned, the full cartridges for this machine are rated at 2,500 pages for black and 2,000 pages for each colour. However, the starter cartridges shipped with these machines are rated at only 1,000 pages each. This is the first time Hewlett-Packard has taken this course of action. Even the CLJ 2600n is shipped with full-yield cartridges – but only because it belongs to the previous generation of printers.

Canon Laser Shot 5200

Manufacturers should always be careful of criticising their competitors – just in case they change their minds in the future and follow that competitor’s lead. Shipping half-full cartridges is just another way of pushing down the advertised purchase price while making sure the printer is actually capable of working when it is first removed from its packaging.

One piece of good news regarding the toner cartridges for these printers though, is that pricing has not changed since October last year.

In reality, we can consider the entire 1600/2600/2605 array of machines as one range with a small speed increase occurring in the middle, as follows:

Apart from the dtn version of the CLJ2605, all versions come with 250-sheet paper capacity as standard, with a single-sheet bypass feeder for printing on card or for priority printing (e.g. letterhead). A second 250-sheet feed can be added as an option to all models to bring them up to the same paper capacity as the dtn.

All versions are equipped with USB 2.0 interfaces and n versions with a 10/100 Ethernet interface. No network option is available for the CLJ 1600. To place this version onto a network, it would be necessary to purchase an external print server. The dtn version also comes equipped with memory card slots for direct photo printing.

It is good to see Hewlett-Packard pushing the duplexing issue further up its list of priorities. After the base model, the Colour LaserJet 2605 has just dn and dtn versions (no network only version), meaning that both duplex and networking are available together for only £90 (36%) extra.

Oki C3200

This is excellent news for customers and begins to put Hewlett-Packard more in line with several of its competitors that are already making duplex a standard feature at all levels.

One final comparison between CLJ 1600 and 2605 is that printer management is via a toolbox on the non-networked versions but via Web JetAdmin on networked versions.

For the cost comparison against the Colour LaserJet 1600, we have strictly selected no-network, GDI models. There is one obvious exception to this – the Dell 3000cn is network-ready but, at a purchase price of £137, it cannot really be ignored as a competitor in the field. A monthly page volume of 1,250 pages has been selected to reflect likely usage in a busy office using the device as its main printer.

Note that for this level of machine, the mixed mono/colour CPP over three years shown in the accompanying table is calculated on the basis of 2,500 pages per month; is based on the use of maximum capacity supplies; takes into account any standard, or starter, supplies shipped with the device; and also includes the cost of purchase. All prices are manufacturer’s recommended prices without tax.

Dell 3000cn

At this low end of the market, Hewlett-Packard seems to be replicating the Lexmark business model, with very low purchase price and very high supplies costs. While purchase price is beaten only by Canon and Dell (both four-pass machines), the Colour LaserJet 1600 is the only printer in the group with a colour CPP that breaks the 10 pence per page level. Even its mono CPP is the only one to break 2 pence (not good for mono printing – it would be cheaper to run a second printer!).

Combining all these elements to calculate a long-term Cost of Printing, we end up with a figure of 4.61 pence per page – 25% higher than its nearest competitor (Oki C3200)! This really is quite an extraordinarily high figure, particularly as it is based on the price of the consumables and not on the price of the machine itself.

Note that for this level of machine, the mixed mono/colour CPP over three years shown in the accompanying table is calculated on the basis of 2,500 pages per month; is based on the use of maximum capacity supplies; takes into account any standard, or starter, supplies shipped with the device; and also includes the cost of purchase. All prices are manufacturer’s recommended prices without tax.

Epson
AcuLaser C1100

Even more extraordinary is the fact that customers can buy and run a business inkjet machine, such as Hewlett-Packard’s OfficeJet Pro K550 for less than half the cost of the Colour LaserJet 1600. Interestingly, Hewlett-Packard quotes normal print speed for the K550 as 10ppm in colour and 12ppm in black – the same as those quoted for the Colour LaserJet 2605, which means that the OfficeJet Pro K550 is faster than the Colour LaserJet 1600.

Oki’s C3200 might be the second most expensive in the group but one has to view this in light of the fact that it has more than double the mono print speed of the CLJ 1600 and colour speed is 50% faster. This fully justifies the higher purchase price for the business environment, especially when its overall cost is so much lower than the CLJ 1600.

Dell 3100

Dell is still the manufacturer that stands out from the crowd at this level. The Dell 3000cn is not only network-ready out of the box, has PCL5e and PCL6 emulations instead of being a GDI printer, costs 37% less to buy than the Colour LaserJet 1600 but also has a long-term Cost of Printing that is 37% lower, the lowest in the group by 16%.

Kyocera Mita
FS-C5020

Xerox Phaser 6120

Lexmark C524

Yes, it is the least expensive machine in the group, costing 11% less to buy even than the Dell 3100cn with an optional duplex unit and a huge 72% less than the Kyocera Mita FS-5020DTN but, in terms of running costs, the toner cartridges are just so expensive that the long-term CPP is an equally huge 53% higher than the FS-5020DTN and a phenomenal 92% higher than the Dell.

Epson
AcuLaser C2600

Brother HL-2700

Oki C5450

So, this makes the new Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 2605dtn ideal for the sophisticated, but low volume, colour user where low purchase price is what counts most. However, clearly, neither Colour LaserJet 1600 or 2605 should be considered to be mono-replacement printers because of both the long-term running costs and the slow mono print speed in comparison to less-costly four-pass machines like the Canon Laser Shot 5200 and Dell’s 3000cn and 3100cn.

~End~

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 12:03 am and is filed under Hardware, Supplies, New Products, Pricing, Comparisons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.