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

Issue #0429/1 - Low purchase price isn’t everything. The magicolor 5430DL is well specified but isn’t as cheap as it looks.

Konica Minolta has launched its latest colour laser printer into the UK, the 20ppm single-pass magicolor 5430DL. This device is not available elsewhere in Europe at this stage. Known for its low purchase pricing (and often high CPP), Konica Minolta has pitched this printer at under £700 (equivalent to about €1,025 / $1,250), a good level for a printer of this type. It does not compete with the extraordinary price of the Oki C5200n at £519 but is beginning to push the envelope occupied by many of the four-pass machines and is available under an introductory offer at £599 (equivalent to about €880 / $1,075)!

Note: 3-year CPP is calculated at a usage rate of 5,000 pages per month printing 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.

Konica Minolta
magicolor 5430DL

With a healthy 60,000-page per month duty cycle, the printer is clearly capable of serving a medium-sized workgroup with significant throughput levels. At this price, it is even network-ready out of the box – quite an advantage for a machine that is targeted squarely at the workgroup environment, meaning that workgroup purchasers do not have to spend more than is first apparent in order to make the device usable. The magicolor 5430DL is also equipped with a USB 2.0 interface.

Other capabilities that purchasers can take advantage of, if they so desire, are optional duplex printing (standard on the magicolor 5430DLD model) and the ability to take two additional paper trays offering 500-sheet capacity each, bringing total capacity to an impressive 1,250 sheets.

Although the nominal mono CPP is around the typical level for mono workgroup printers, at 1.41 pence, the colour CPP is rather high at 7.47 pence.

Dell’s new 5100cn will also compete in this group but, as full information is not yet available, it has not been included in this issue.

Particularly worthy of note is that, apart from the Kyocera FS-C5016N and the Lexmark C752Ln, the 3-year running costs for all these printers are within about 10% of one another despite the fact that hardware purchase prices vary by almost 200%. This amply demonstrates the ‘competitive pricing’ technique used by manufacturers – who want to buy market share with low purchase prices.

But, at the end of the day, there is no intrinsic advantage.

When long term CPP is carefully calculated to be at about the same level as the competitors, any advantage to be gained through choice of machine is only through accounting procedures that allow an annual depreciation of the capital value (in which case, isn’t it best to buy the most expensive machine and pay less for the consumables??!). So, why are businesses so hung up on buying the cheapest equipment, foregoing the value of depreciation, just to pay over the odds for it as the years progress? During focus groups run as part of pre-launch field trials run by CharisCo, many users have commented that they would rather pay a little more for the hardware in order to benefit from lower consumables costs.

Kyocera FS-5016N

Kyocera’s FS-C5016N is the printer that scores most on this front. Even though its purchase cost is second highest in the group, the 3-year CPP is more than one-third lower than most of the other printers and only 40% of the amount users will pay long term for the Lexmark C752Ln.

In terms of downsides, the magicolor 5430 is fitted with one-piece toner/drum units (like most mono laser printers and Hewlett-Packard colour laser printers). Konica Minolta presents this as a benefit in that it “allows for easy maintenance and low running costs”.

While no one would argue that this configuration has the advantage of making maintenance easy – interventions are reduced, meaning that there are fewer occasions when the user needs to stop the printer and open it up in order to replace consumables – there is also a downside.

Hewlett-Packard
LaserJet 3700

That downside is that running costs will always be higher than other configurations. Hewlett-Packard has not been able to achieve a low CPP with this configuration and nor will Konica Minolta. The CPP from Hewlett-Packard is second in magnitude only to Lexmark (surprise, surprise!) and the CPP from Konica Minolta, albeit lower, is at the high end of the group.

Furthermore, the number of consumable items used in the Konica Minolta magicolor 5430 only equals the lowest used in colour page printers – five – rather than beating it. Other printers in this group using just five consumable items are Xerox’s solid ink printer, the Phaser 8400 and Kyocera’s FS-C5016N – which really only uses four consumables (toner cartridges) plus maintenance kit at a huge 200,000 page interval.

In fact, a Kyocera FS-C5016N owner printing 5,000 pages per month over three years will not incur the cost of the maintenance kit at all! Even if the user bought a maintenance kit within the period, the 3-year CPP would only rise to 2.28 pence from 2.04 pence – an increase of 12% but still keeping the CPP at less than half that of the Lexmark and not more than two-thirds the average level of the other printers.

Had the magicolor 5430 been configured with separate drums or a transfer belt unit, offering a three or four-fold increase in life expectancy, instead of single-piece cartridges, the CPP figures could have been considerably lower.

Oki C5200n

~End~

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 18th, 2004 at 12:04 am and is filed under Hardware, New Products, 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.