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

Issue #0711/1 - Oki’s new C8600 enters the market with a very much reduced physical size and a Total Cost of Printing to match. Only Epson matches the Cost of Printing.

So far this year we’ve run two articles about A3 colour printers, including considering A3 colour inkjet as a general office printer (Issue #0703 "A3 inkjet printers, rarely targeted at the office but offer excellent value for money") and the high end of A3 colour laser printers (Issue #0704 "High-end A3 colour printer targeted at contract sales - Kyocera Mita FS-C8100DN"). This year has also seen the introduction of a new entry-level A3 device from Oki that sets new parameters for A3 colour printing, not just in terms of purchase price and Cost of Printing – and the C8600 is the cheapest to buy and does offer some of the keenest long term Cost of Printing, up to a point – but also in terms of physical size.

Here we consider the A3 entry-level situation, why going A3 might be a good move for some organisations and which devices would offer the best point of entry. So, we compare the new Oki C8600 with the competing A3 colour laser printers that fall at the lower end of the pricing scale.

Why A3?

A3 printing causes something of a problem for many organisations, especially small organisations. Estimates suggest that very few pages printed (perhaps as low as 3%), even in large corporations, are in A3 format. Yet how often have you thought that an A3 printout would be helpful for the task in hand, I wonder?

How about the real estate agent? Although many are now printing property details on the spot with colour page printers, some are still in the dark ages with details printed out-of-house. Those that are really on the ball are printing less as buyers ask for details to be sent by email rather than traditional post. This opens up the potential for short-run jobs to be handled in-house even further because the length of the print run will shorten further.

For those buyers who visit the agency in person to register interest and want to walk away with a bundle of details, what better way to fulfil that need (particularly for prestige properties) than with an glossy A3 folded brochure with lots of pictures? There is just no doubt that an A3 fold is far more classy than two A4 sheets stapled together.

Folded A3 brochure style documents and small booklets would also be invaluable to a host of other applications where messaging is critical.

Then, how about the office with spreadsheet requirements? There are so many potential applications that fall into this category that I’m not even going to begin to list even a few. Suffice it to say that when a spreadsheet needs to be printed for sharing, collaboration, illustration, etc., A3 can be an absolute must-have.

Public, education and charity organisations (as well as large businesses) are renowned for their need to create posters. Limiting these to A4 can really be detrimental to conveying the message.

This is just a taster of the potential for A3 printing. What is it that prevents users making the step into this larger format?

• Price!
• Awareness.

A3 does not have to be limited to graphics professionals and corporate print shops any longer.

Short list

Purchase prices of A3 laser printers, even mono, have been astronomical. They are falling but we are currently at the stage where the range of prices is high.

In Issue #0703 - "A3 inkjet printers, rarely targeted at the office but offer excellent value for money" we saw how the cost of A3 inkjet printers starts at a point at least 4x higher than an A4 inkjet printers and prices range upwards by at least 80%.

Taking out of the A3 colour laser printer equation devices that are clearly targeted at the higher levels (high-end office and graphics), we are left with a group of six devices that could be considered to fall into an entry-level category. However, only two of them really count as entry-level.

These are the Epson AcuLaser 9100, priced at just £1,671, and the new Oki C8600, priced even lower at £1,595. None of the other four (taking network-ready models only) are priced below £2,000 and the highest priced pair are the Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 5550n (£2,590), closely followed by the Xerox Phaser 7400N (£2,556). This is a 62% price range.

This is not where it stops of course – to go further up the range, Kyocera Mita’s FS-C8100 (see Issue #0704 "High-end A3 colour printer targeted at contract sales - Kyocera Mita FS-C8100DN") is targeted to compete against the Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 5550 but is priced at £7,449DN (duplex-ready as well as network-ready). As an entry-level comparison, this printer is excluded, as it the Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 9500, which starts at £4,920 and the Xerox Phaser 7760, priced at £4,832.

In the middle ground – at the higher end of the middle ground – we are then left with the Konica Minolta magicolor 7450 and the Lexmark C920.

All models included in the pricing and cost comparisons are network-ready models. Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark are the only two manufacturers that do not include network interface as standard in their base models and therefore the slightly more expensive network-ready model has been selected to ensure comparability.

Savings of 8% (~£200) can be made on the initial purchase price by selecting the standalone base model but users should consider very carefully whether a printer if this nature will ever be required as a standalone device rather than a shared device. The benefits of shared printers in an office environment are significant but Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark clearly believe that there is still a place for standalone versions at this level.

Desktop usage/size

One of Oki’s marketing messages on the C8600 is its size. The difference is not hard to demonstrate by looking at the gross volume of the devices!

With a gross volume of less than one-tenth of a cubic metre (<3.5 cubic feet), the C8600 is an extraordinarily small machine. Certainly compared to its competitors, where gross volume starts at nearly twice that size and goes up to well over 2½x the size (Hewlett-Packard), the difference is astounding. In addition weight is at least 20% lower than its competitors and half that of the Lexmark.

Much of the difference is in the height, where 341mm (13.4 inches) ensures that the printer stands only just over half the height of the tallest printer (Hewlett-Packard CLJ5550).

Also, Oki has been able to make the C8600 significantly narrower that its competitors while still achieving its A3 format – measuring just 485mm (19.1 inches) wide against the 695mm (27.4 inches) of the Lexmark, making it 30% smaller.

So, this device can be considered truly to be a desktop printer, whereas most A3 printers are so large that they would swamp a desk and could risk breaking a flimsy piece of office furniture. In particular, the high-end devices excluded from this group, like the Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 9500, Kyocera Mita FS-C8100 and Xerox Phaser 7760, would hardly be considered to be desktop devices and will normally require other arrangements.

Manufacturer Model	Gross Volume		Size relative to Oki C8600	Weight (kg)
	(cubic metres)	(cubic inches)
Epson AcuLaser C9100	0.202	7.13	106%	59.0
Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 5550n	0.260	9.18	165%	60.0
Konica Minolta Magicolor 7450	0.187	6.60	91%	51.0
Lexmark C920n	0.253	8.93	158%	80.5
Oki C8600n	0.098	3.46	0%	40.0
Xerox Phaser 7400N	0.188	6.64	92%	84.0

Pricing strategy

Something we do notice with the C8600 is that it strongly follows the principle of “cheap printer, costly supplies”.

With it purchase price of only £1,595, it is the cheapest A3 colour laser printer on the market. However, the cost of its mono toner is second only to Lexmark and colour toner is again at the higher end of the scale, on a par with Konica Minolta and with only Lexmark and Xerox showing higher cost.

In the end, Oki has positioned the C8600 very carefully so that, because of its very low purchase price, the long-term Cost of Printing at 2,500 pages per month and 70% mono/30% colour, is very low but not quite lowest. Epson’s AcuLaser C9100, the other low-priced model undercuts Oki because Epson follows its strategy of offering very low-cost mono printing – Epson’s colour CPP is also the lowest in the group.

Total Cost of Printing

Entry-level A3 Colour Laser (base-n-model) - Chart 1.

In Chart 1, it is noted that the Oki C8600 tracks quite close to the Epson as print volume rises, although it never manages to undercut it. In fact the CPPs are diverging as we reach 10,000 pages per month – a figure that is double Oki’s recommended average monthly volume.

Combined high nominal mono and colour CPP, and relatively high purchase price, ensure that the Lexmark C920 is near the top of the league for high overall Cost of Printing but, remarkably, not at the top at 2,500 pages per month. That position actually goes to Konica Minolta (see article 2 - "Konica Minolta re-assesses price positioning on A3 laser" for further comment).

However, push the print volumes up by just a few hundred pages per month and the Lexmark shoots straight to the top and stays there.

This is because Lexmark suffers from a hugely expensive fuser and transfer kit. As soon as these kick in (at 105K and 120K pages respectively), the CPP shoots through the roof and the machine becomes the most expensive in the group even though, at a very low page volume, it started off on a par with the Hewlett-Packard and Konica Minolta printers (base models).

Where the Oki really scores economically, is where users want the additional capability of the upper-end models. Whereas Epson’s base model is priced at about the same level as the C8600 (<5% higher), there is a 50% difference between the dtn models from each manufacturer.

This means that it is Oki’s C8600dtn that sits firmly at the bottom of the CPP chart (Chart 2) – but only until print volume rises to about 8,500 pages per month, where Epson’s AcuLaser 9100 takes over due to its very low nominal mono CPP, despite its rather higher initial purchase price.

Total Cost of Printing

Entry-level A3 Colour Laser (dtn model) - Chart 2.

There is a certain amount of position-switching in this chart, particularly as the Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 5550dtn drops from its position at the top of the chart because of high purchase price to a point at the lower end of the middle grouping as volumes rise. On the whole, this middle grouping tracks along in a very tight band.

UK - A3 Single-pass colour	Purchase Duty Cycle	Print Speed		Nominal CPP	Mixed mono/colour CPP over 3 years
Epson AcuLaser C9100	£1,671 80,000	Mono Colour	24ppm 24ppm	0.61 pence 5.61 pence	3.82 pence
Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 5550n	£2,590 120,000	Mono Colour	22ppm 22ppm	1.20 pence 5.69 pence	4.93 pence
Konica Minolta Magicolor 7450	£2,395 120,000	Mono Colour	25ppm 25ppm	1.42 pence 5.98 pence	5.42 pence
Lexmark C920n	£2,244 200,000	Mono Colour	36ppm 32ppm	2.15 pence 6.79 pence	5.18 pence
Oki C8600n	£1,595 75,000	Mono Colour	26ppm 15ppm	1.64 pence 5.99 pence	4.00 pence
Xerox Phaser 7400N	£2,556 150,000	Mono Colour	40ppm 36ppm	1.31 pence 6.52 pence	5.39 pence

So, we can conclude that it is a combination of the model that is chosen, and the print volume, that determines whether Oki is the least expensive option or not. But, whatever the situation, it is never a costly machine to own.

In summary then, whether the reason for buying an A3 printer is to obtain that specific format, or perhaps to extend the organisation’s activities into A3 printing, then Oki’s C8600 is a good choice where Cost of Printing is concerned. In addition, for the small office environment, the Oki is a good choice on account of both its low purchase price and its small physical size.

~End~

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 12:03 am and is filed under Hardware, New Products, Pricing, Comparisons, Total Cost of Printing. 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.