Issue #0738/1 - Buying the right printer from a pre-selected manufacturer can still be confusing because of the differing marketing strategies used by the various players in the market, meaning that the low-end of the range may never be the best value. A competitive comparison should always include not only a comparison of devices from competing manufacturers but a comparison of more than one model from each manufacturer.
Last week’s article "Every printer is affordable, when a buyer decides it is" offered a broad-brush definition of ‘appropriate to use’, using motor vehicles as an analogy. But, it did not offer detail or illustrations.
So, this week we investigate ‘appropriate to use’ in more detail, with some examples of exactly what it means to the user in terms of Total Cost of Printing.
Using the illustration of 4×4/SUV vehicles versus family or compact cars last week was a deliberately emotive analogy because people either love or hate 4×4/SUVs, most people having fairly strong views as to their appropriateness to transportation in urban areas.
Printers do not evoke the same emotions at all. So much so in fact, that even though a more appropriate device frequently could be chosen, any mismatch really only affects the purchaser (in terms of finances) and users (in terms of functionality). Unlike 4×4/SUVs, a wrong selection does not have an impact on third parties or owners of other printers.
In this article we look at A4 mono laser printers from three individual manufacturers as a way of illustrating ‘appropriate to use’ from the perspective of Total Cost of Printing, comparing the devices within the manufacturers’ range as opposed to comparing the manufacturers. There are, of course, some comparisons that can be made between the manufacturers – but, that is not the main focus of the article.
These manufacturers are Hewlett-Packard, Kyocera and Lexmark.
Hewlett-Packard is included because it is the market leader and normally falls somewhere in the middle of the field when it comes to Cost of Printing. Kyocera consistently and predictably offers the lowest Cost of Printing, while Lexmark is predictable in presenting some of the highest Cost of Printing on the market.
Definition
‘Appropriate to use’ where printers are concerned can be defined as the balance of Cost of Printing set against the technology, performance and features offered by the printer.In the same way that many people consider it inappropriate to use a 4×4/SUV to deliver children to the busy school gates in the crowded and often narrow streets of London or Paris, for a home-worker to have an 80ppm colour MFP in a small and cluttered bedroom for printing of a handful of quotations and invoices per week would be inappropriate. Likewise, it would be inappropriate for a print-critical corporation (Citibank or HSBC for instance) to use a 14ppm inkjet printer to produce statements for its customers.
Major components
Cost of Printing should be considered to be an essential measure in the whole definition of ‘appropriate to use’ but is often ignored. This is probably the crux of the matter because the purchase of a wrong device can seriously damage your wealth whereas it may only be frustration in terms of features and capabilities.Purchase price, as the most immediately visible factor in any purchase, is probably the most obvious indicator of ‘appropriate to use’ in the broad sense of the phrase – consider the pricing of the machines mentioned in the example above.
Within a manufacturer’s range, the hardware purchase price of each model is in direct proportion to the capabilities of the machine.
Print speed is the most significant of these. Thus, we find 24ppm printers costing more than 12ppm printers and 45ppm printers costing more again. Similarly, colour laser printers cost more to buy than mono laser printers and fast single-pass colour lasers cost more than slow four-pass machines.
Other hardware specifications then follow on with the ability to render a machine either wholly appropriate or totally inappropriate. For instance:
- any organisation with more than one worker requiring access to a printer must have a network interface on the supplied printer
- organisations creating marketing collateral will almost certainly require colour printing
- those printing multi-page reports will benefit significantly from duplex capability
- professional design and advertising agencies or corporate departments will almost certainly require the benefits of PostScript as a Page Description Language
- a hard disk or memory card opens up the possibility of secure password printing, proof and hold printing, HDD collation and font/forms storage
Software/driver features then also add value to printers, AiOs and MFPs. For instance:
- productivity software offering features such as booklet printing, poster printing, negative image and mirror printing, watermarks, RAM collation, user templates, etc. all extend the capabilities of a device
- some multifunction machines ship with sophisticated document management software, such as ScanSoft’s PaperPort
- major corporations with hundreds of printers to manage need effective network management capabilities, preferably with email alert functionality
However, behind the price are more than just print speed and other specifications, although print speed is one of the more important elements.
Alongside print speed goes the durability of the printer. In general, the faster the printer, the more durable it will be, indicated by a higher quoted duty cycle – it has to be because of the higher expectations regarding print throughput over the life of the printer.
Durability is perhaps the cost component that has most direct influence on the purchase price. This is because the cost of building a robust fast laser-based machine, which is capable of churning out hundreds of pages a day, reliably, day after day, is far higher than the cost of building an inkjet printer to print a couple of pages a day. For one thing, to obtain the high levels of structural rigidity required for printing accurately-registered colour documents in a large machine requires a heavier build.
Where the price-indicator principle falls apart is when attempting to compare similarly specified printers from different manufacturers. This is simply because of the different marketing strategies employed by manufacturers – and we won’t consider that any further here because it gets plenty of attention in TCPglobal on a regular basis. Suffice it to say that a £270 printer from Kyocera may be a direct competitor to a £90 printer from Lexmark and still cost the user less in the long run.
So, let’s turn to three groups of printers to see how ‘appropriate to use’ is indicated by running the machines through our standard Total Cost of Printing model.
For this exercise, we’ve selected representative mono laser printers, up the range from each manufacturer, in some instances using only one of two printers that share the same consumables, and ensuring that every machine is network-capable. It should be noted that duplex is provided as a standard feature on a number of models, adding extra value to the device. For other models (except low-end models where duplex is not available at all), a duplex unit would cost extra.
Three-year Cost of Printing is based on the purchase price of the device plus the cost of printing a given number of pages per month and includes all relevant consumables, including maintenance kits.
|
A4 Network Mono Laser Printers – UK Hewlett-Packard |
Print Speed | Duty Cycle | Duplex | Purchase Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LaserJet 1022n | 18 ppm | 8,000 | Not available | £194 |
| LaserJet P2015n | 26 ppm | 15,000 | Option | £249 |
| LaserJet P3005n | 33 ppm | 100,000 | Option | £615 |
| LaserJet 4250n | 43 ppm | 200,000 | Option | £940 |
|
A4 Network Mono Laser Printers – UK Kyocera |
Print Speed | Duty Cycle | Duplex | Purchase Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FS-920 (+N) | 18 ppm | 15,000 | Not available | £231 |
| FS-1030DN | 22 ppm | 20,000 | Standard | £270 |
| FS-2000DN | 30 ppm | 150,000 | Standard | £527 |
| FS-3900DN | 35 ppm | 200,000 | Standard | £635 |
| FS-4000DN | 45 ppm | 250,000 | Standard | £849 |
|
A4 Network Mono Laser Printers – UK Lexmark |
Print Speed | Duty Cycle | Duplex | Purchase Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E120n | 20 ppm | 10,000 | Not available | £87 |
| E250dn | 28 ppm | 25,000 | Standard | £149 |
| E352dn | 33 ppm | 80,000 | Standard | £264 |
| E450dn | 33 ppm | 45,000 | Standard | £339 |
| T642n | 45 ppm | 225,000 | Option | £649 |
| T644n | 50 ppm | 250,000 | Option | £819 |
In order that we can consider a very wide range of monthly page counts, where maintenance kits are not available, the cost of purchasing more than one printer has been included in the figure, based on an estimated end-of-life page count. These could be operated as multiple printers running alongside one another, particularly in the case of the low-end printers, or, for mid-range machines, replacing the printer with a new one at its end-of-life.
Unfortunately, we could not bring the page count as low as 25 or 50 pages per month because the CPP of most printers at that level would be so high that the rest of the chart would be so compressed at the bottom as to render the information meaningless. Therefore, the lowest monthly figure used is 250 pages but pushing right up to 25,000 pages per month, at which point even the high-end printers would be stretched close to their limit (900,000 pages over three years).
In addition to presenting the straight hardware purchase price in tabular format and Cost of Printing data in line chart format, we have also introduced a further line chart showing the number of maintenance kits that would be required to keep the printer running for the full three years at the given page count. In the case of printers with no maintenance kit, the figure represents the number of printers required to handle the given page count.
Cost of Printing
There have been several occasions when we have offered cost comparisons between colour laser and inkjet but never done a detailed comparison, over a range of page volumes, of printers within a printer technology.One of the most interesting points to note when considering the Cost of Printing charts is how marketing strategy affects the relative positions of each printer from each manufacturer.
With three of its printers, Hewlett-Packard displays the classic Cost of Printing situation where the entry-level workgroup printer is least costly at low print volumes while the high-end departmental printer is the most expensive but the situation reverses at high print volumes.
Cost of Printing
Hewlett-Packard Mono Laser Printers
Number of Maintenance Kits/New Printers Required
Hewlett-Packard Mono Laser Printers
Standing out against this classic scenario is the low-end, personal/small workgroup printer, LaserJet 1022n which has deliberately been positioned high on running costs because print volumes are expected to be low. Thus, this printer is always more expensive than the LaserJet P2015n – even at 25 pages per month!
Use of the LaserJet 1022 is OK up to the 1,000-page per month level, although even the LaserJet P3005n is less costly to run at this page count and the high-level LaserJet 4250n costs only a fraction higher. Above 1,000 pages per month, it would be necessary to run at least two LaserJet 1022n printers to have the capacity to achieve the required number of pages. As the page count rises, up to 17 additional units (18 printers in all) would be required if 25,000 pages per month were to be printed solely on LaserJet 1022n models.
Even selecting the LaserJet P3005n, four additional printers would need to be bought and operated in order to print 900,000 pages over three years. By comparison, the LaserJet 4250n would just require the purchase and installation of three maintenance kits in the original printer in order to keep it going.
And, remember that running 18 printers (LaserJet 1022n) requires an enormous amount more office space than running just one printer (LaserJet 4250n) – all at a cost!
Turning then to the Kyocera models, we see that the classic scenario is perhaps a little more marked than with Hewlett-Packard, except that all three of the higher level machines (each with a 300,000-page maintenance kit) have been priced to produce a very tight grouping of long-term CPPs as one another at high print volumes (5,000 pages upwards).
Cost of Printing
Kyocera Mono Laser Printers
Number of Maintenance Kits/New Printers Required
Kyocera Mono Laser Printers
Note: All maintenance kits have the same life expectancy - FS-2000DN - FS-3900DN - FS-4000DN
In addition, apart from the cost being somewhat lower than the cost of running Hewlett-Packard or Lexmark models, low-end models sit much closer together, allowing potential customers to choose between the FS-920 (with network interface) and FS-1030DN much more on the basis of required hardware features than on Cost of Printing.
However, at 25,000 pages per month there is still a 20% advantage to owning the FS-4000DN over the FS-2000DN and there is the added 15ppm speed advantage in the FS-4000DN.
As with the Hewlett-Packard range, several units of the lower end printers would be required for high page counts but starting at a page count higher than 2,500 pages per month instead of 1,000 pages per month. This is because Kyocera models tend to have higher duty cycles than equivalent Hewlett-Packard models.
By almost complete contrast, Lexmark adheres to the classic cost model only where the two high-end machines are concerned. All four of the other printers (those without maintenance kits) are priced such that there is almost no cost crossover with increased page volume.
Lexmark is deliberately targeting low entry cost with its very low hardware purchase prices, especially at the low end, and piling recovery of its financial loss on hardware sales onto the consumables. Lexmark appears to have no intention of allowing customers to benefit from lower Cost of Printing if they buy up the range, except in the case of serious corporate customers who are prepared to buy at the top of the range and who can guarantee high page volumes.
Cost of Printing
Lexmark Mono Laser Printers
Number of Maintenance Kits/New Printers Required
Lexmark Mono Laser Printers
Note: Both printers use the same maintenance kit - T644n - T642n
Again, multiple units of the lower end models would be required to handle high print volumes – up to 13 additional units with the E120n.
So, clearly the choice of an appropriate printer for the required use is a question of balancing technological characteristics and requirements with purchase price and Total Cost of Printing.
With the vast majority of manufacturers, the precise choice of best value printer will then be dependent on the number of pages to be printed. What is interesting and surprising is that there is a very clear crossing point with both Hewlett-Packard and Kyocera (and therefore probably most manufacturers), at a point between 2,500 and 5,000 pages per month, where the whole balance of costs reverses.
What is obvious is that the base model in each manufacturer’s range should generally be avoided as being more expensive to operate than the next model up the range. Out of the three sets of models used for these illustrations, it is only Kyocera’s FS-920, with network interface, that sits very close to its next closest sibling. But it must be remembered that the FS-1030DN offers the advantage of duplex printing for about the same overall cost per page as the FS-920.
Lexmark’s E450dn offersthe best value for money
for all users printing up to
3,500 pages per month
