Issue #0519/2 - Some colour laser printers have up to 10 or 11 user replaceable parts while others have as few as five – some have toner cartridges producing 10,000 pages while others produce only 5,000. How does this affect cost?
Each manufacturer projects its own colour printer configuration as being the best. This may be the single-piece toner units with waste toner bottle configuration used by Konica Minolta right through to the individual toners, imaging drums, transfer belt and fuser used by Oki – and several varieties in between.
In Hewlett-Packard’s case, the argument is largely based around the fact that the drum is replaced along with every toner cartridge changed – resulting in more consistent high quality throughout the life of the printer.
In the case of manufacturers such as Brother and Oki – and especially Kyocera Mita – we are more likely to hear claims of reducing user interventions and the number of units used (and therefore the quantity of packaging in the case of Kyocera Mita) because imaging drums, especially the amorphous silicon drums used by Kyocera Mita, will last longer than the number of pages restricted by the quantity of toner in a single-piece carrtidge.
Indeed, the argument is made that a motorist would not be too happy to pay for a new engine every time the vehicle needed servicing – typically at 10,000 or 12,000 miles (16,000 or 20,000 kilometres) – so why effectively change the engine every time toner is required in a printer?
TCPglobal’s regular cost comparisons handles the aspect of this argument surrounding the number of individual units used, and therefore the overall cost of consumables over the life of a printer, so here we have a look at how different printer configurations affect the number of times a printer needs day-to-day maintenance in order to service the Customer Replaceable Units (CRUs) – i.e. the toners, drums, belts, fusers and waste toner bottles.
Relating to the adjacent article, the Oki C7350 has a toner life of 10,000 pages (at 5%) for each colour while each of the four imaging drums has a life expectancy of 23,000 pages and both fuser and transport belt are rated at 60,000 pages – a total of 10 CRUs. So, according to rated specifications, the user needs to maintain the device not only every 10,000 pages (starting at 5,000 pages to replace the starter toners) but also at 23,000 pages, 46,000 pages, 60,000 pages, 69,000 pages, etc.
By the time the unpredictability of toner usage is taken into account, meaning that each individual toner and each individual imaging drum has a life of its own, the user could be changing supplies rather too frequently for comfort! At worst, this could be 61 interruptions for every 100,000 pages as opposed to the best-case scenario of 14 interruptions.
It should be clearly stated here, though, that even if the user replaces toners on the basis of exhaustion, it is rather more likely that the drums will all be replaced at the same time and that the transfer belt and fuser will also both be replaced at the same time. This does reduce the number of interventions significantly but, because the drums, belts and fuser will almost certainly last longer than the rated lives, an argument could easily be made for replacing these units on an as-required basis if the user is targeting minimum hard running costs and ignoring frequency of interventions.
However, to balance that, a printer with single-piece toners and a waste toner bottle (5 CRUs), like the Konica Minolta magicolor 5430, or with single-piece toners, belt and transfer drum (6 CRUs), like the Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 3700, could also suffer a high frequency of interruptions – largely because the toner cartridges have rather shorter lives than Oki’s 10,000-page units (6,000 pages from Konica Minolta and 6,000 pages for the toners from Hewlett-Packard and 75,000 pages for the belt and fuser units).
In these situations a user could end up with around 85 interventions with the Konica Minolta and around 70 with the Hewlett-Packard – actually worse than the Oki worst-case scenario! These interventions would be considerably reduced (to around 50-55) if these manufacturers shipped 10,000-page toners like Oki. This would mean that the minimum number of interventions could be reduced to as little as 10.
Just to emphasise the significance of the day-to-day maintenance, if 100,000 pages were printed over three years, the Oki printer would need a maintenance visit every 11 days in the worst case, against every 47 days in the best case scenario shown. If Oki had more closely aligned the life expectancy of the drums, belts and fuser units, the number of interventions could have been reduced to 10 in the best case.
In the case of the Konica Minolta and Hewlett-Packard machines, attention would be required at least every 8 days and 10 days respectively in the worst case and around every 55 days in the best case for the Hewlett-Packard. For all three printers, if the belts/fusers/etc were all replaced at the same time as changing toners, the number of interventions could be reduced to a minimum of 10 – once every 66 days.
Perhaps it is worth wasting a little toner once in a while (say, when there is less than 10% toner left in other cartridges) - but definitely not every time – to minimise the number of interventions? However, I’m not going to work that one out right now!
~End~
