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

Issue #0511/1 - Xerox hits the market with a revolutionary new colour MFP product that offers true colour MFP functionality to small office and workgroup environments.

Xerox has beaten all of its competitors to offer the first fully functional A4 colour MFP to the market that is priced to be accessible to the small office. Literature from Xerox for the WorkCentre C2424 boldly states “Unbelievable functionality at a great price” – for once I agree wholeheartedly with a manufacturer’s marketing material! This is a long-awaited product.

With colour MFPs previously costing upwards of £5,000/€7,000/$7,000 (and frequently more than double that price), targeted at large office environments and with the market crying out for a small office A4 device, the market has been open for Konica Minolta with its scanner-attached ultra low-end magicolor ScanCopy models priced between £350 and £550.

These models certainly filled a yawning gap in the market but could not truthfully be described as MFPs – rather as colour All-in-One machines. In fact, Konica Minolta has now discontinued the ScanCopy line anyway!

However, in the WorkCentre C2424, Xerox has introduced a genuine multifunctional, multitasking colour device that can hold its own, in terms of functionality, against any one of the high level colour MFPs available either from Xerox or its competitors. Xerox has, in effect, applied all of its high level expertise into a machine that is affordable to the colour dependent small office or busy workgroup at £1,999/€2,999/$2,999.

For instance, as it is based on the Phaser 8400 solid ink colour printer engine, the WorkCentre C2424 can replace colour printers entirely in environments such as estate agents where highly accessible colour is essential but where colour has been limited to the print functionality because colour copy devices have been too expensive.

This is in no small part due to the robust design and build of the machine, offering a high duty cycle (85,000 pages per month) and the fact that it is both network-ready and has automatic duplex capability as standard out of the box.

Xerox WorkCentre C2424

Add to this automatic duplex scanning from the 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), both PCL5c and PostScript page description languages and 40GB hard drive as standard and the machine is ready for anything.

And ‘anything’ is certainly what this machine is ready for. Xerox has designed the C2424 for seamless integration between the functions and print/copy or scan multitasking. In practice this means that the device can be used for scanning or copying while it is printing a job from either your PC or a colleagues PC – no need to wait till it is standing idle!

In fact, not only is there no need to wait till the device becomes idle, if the MFP is printing a large print job, users can safely put their copy jobs through without having to wait at all, thanks to the interrupt copy feature. The print job will automatically resume once the copy job is completed.

On the point of waiting – one of the characteristics of solid ink technology is that the device has to be kept warm 24 hours a day to keep the ink soft, meaning that it should never be powered down (except for moving). During an extended period of idleness (e.g. at night) a lower than working temperature will be maintained but the working temperature has be regained before printing can begin.

Re-warming takes time. But, Xerox has built an intelligent learning capability into the solid ink Phaser and MFP machines that means it anticipates when it will be used! Clever – the result is that the device will warm itself up ready for work at 9 am if experience tells it that 9 am is the time it is likely to be first used. If, however, it knows that it is never used before 11:30 am, when there is usually a large print run, of data sheets for instance, and then used again at 4:30pm for an invoice run, it will warm itself up for those specific times, maintaining the lower temperature between usage times.

Power users will be familiar with the booklet printing capability of many printers from Xerox and other manufacturers. Selecting ‘Booklet Printing’ tells the print driver to collate pages in the correct order for printing two images per page and printing on both sides of the paper so that, once stapled together and folded, the document read correctly as a booklet.

Going one step further, the integrated hard disk in the WorkCentre C2424 allows users to copy an entire booklet without ever un-stapling or dismantling it! ‘Booklet Copy’ ensures that the booklet will be collated electronically on the hard disk and printed in the correct configuration for the copy to be stapled together as a correct-reading booklet directly from the out-tray (sorry, no integrated stapler with this device!).

More high-end features offered by the C2424’s hard disk include safe/secure/proof printing to ensure confidentiality and satisfaction of print jobs and to provide for extended font storage.

Automatic self-installation of the C2424 onto a network (like other Xerox network devices) is claimed to require only four mouse-clicks from the user and CentreWare IS is provided for remote network management, accessing the embedded web server using a standard web browser.

In addition to basic scanning available as standard on the two lower models of C2424, the C2424DX configuration comes with three additional pieces of software for advanced scanning functionality. These are OmniPage Pro for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), PaperPort Pro for viewing and organisation of scanned documents and Image Retriever that delivers automatic Scan to PC, Scan to Public Folder and Scan to Secure Mailbox functionality.

While the base model (DN - Duplex/Network) has a 525-page paper feeder as standard, the machine can be upgraded to take a further two 525-page feeders, providing a maximum paper capacity of 1,675 sheets, including the 100-sheet general purpose feeder. Note that the capacity of the feeders is 525 sheets, allowing a whole ream to be inserted in one operation.

WorkCentre
C2424DP and DX

This might seem confusing to many printer users because these devices have all the appearance of being laser printers. Indeed they are classified as ‘page printers’, together with laser printers, because the data is processed and handled for a full page in one go as opposed to being processed line by line while printing in the way a liquid inkjet printer does.

But, solid ink printers are actually exactly what they say – solid ink. The only difference between solid ink and liquid ink, in terms of application of ink to media, is that liquid inkjet printers spit the ink directly onto the media line by line, while solid ink printers spit the ink onto a drum as it rotates, which then transfers the completed image to the media in one pass – exactly like a laser 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 5,000 pages per month (70% mono pages and 30% colour pages) using maximum capacity toners and takes into account any standard, or starter, toner cartridges shipped with the printer and includes the purchase price.

What this means in practice is that the image produced by the solid ink device is just as dependent on the number of ink dots placed on the media for its quality as a liquid inkjet printer is. Essentially, the more dots placed, the higher the image quality - and we are all familiar with how a liquid inkjet printer slows down when we want to print high quality photographs!

Thus, the image quality, and therefore the print speed, of a solid ink printer is adjustable/variable and is reduced when we want to print high quality images. Set for ‘normal’ print quality at a print speed of 12ppm, the Phaser 8400/WorkCentre C2424 is said to satisfy most users. Print quality can be adjusted for draft or quick print quality, at a print speed of 24ppm, and also adjusted for best print quality of photographs, at a print speed of 7ppm.

Fully configured C2424

While the solid ink Xerox Phaser 8400 falls in the lower middle of the pack with its mono CPP of 1.07 (min=0.62 pence, Dell 5100cn; max=1.53 pence, Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 3700dn), it falls more towards the upper middle of the pack with its colour CPP of 7.15 pence (min=3.24 pence, Kyocera Mita FS-C5016DN; max=7.47 pence, Konica Minolta magicolor 5430DLD).

Note here how it is the models with the lowest and highest mono CPPs that also work out with the lowest and highest overall CPP. This emphasises the importance of the mono cartridge pricing in the long term Cost of Printing.

In fact, the ink stix for the WorkCentre C2424 have been specifically keyed so that they fit only this device. They are not interchangeable with the Phaser 8400. This is a pure marketing feature designed to separate this device from the single function Phaser 8400 in operational and cost centre terms. Ink for the MFP costs approximately 4.8% more than ink for the printer – doubtless to compensate for the low MFP purchase price.

So, comparing the C2424 with the Phaser 8400, as there are no direct competitors to compare with, we see relative costs as in the accompanying table.

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 5,000 pages per month (70% mono pages and 30% colour pages) using maximum capacity toners and takes into account any standard, or starter, toner cartridges shipped with the printer and includes the purchase price.

Wisely, Xerox has kept the Black ink price down, in fact it is just a fraction lower than the Black ink for the Phaser 8400, giving a CPP that is 0.01 pence lower. But, with the colour inks costing 4.8% more than those for the printer, the colour CPP works out 4% higher.

Taking into account the purchase price, and printing 5,000 pages over three years (30% colour and 70% mono), we see that the overall CPP of the MFP is only 21% higher than the printer for the incalculable extra value offered by the MFP package.

Had the inks been the same price as those for the printer however, the CPP on the MFP would have been only 18% higher.

Companies such as Samsung have commented that they would not introduce a low-end colour MFP unless they could make it a fully integrated and fully functional MFP at a suitable price. The suggestion at the time was that such a device would cost at least £2,000 – and that was utilising an ultra low-end print engine!

Here we see Xerox using the highly acclaimed Phaser 8400 solid ink engine to produce an MFP with capabilities that Samsung could only dream of, at the price Samsung would have targeted.

Well done Xerox.

~End~

This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2005 at 12:03 am and is filed under Print Technology, Hardware, New Products, Pricing, News. 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.