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

Issue #0536/1 - As the race to equip with colour gathers pace, we take a look at the relative costs of colour inkjet against colour laser, what it means in terms of the capabilities available to us and where each may be appropriate.

“All printers will be colour within 10 years” – Lexmark industry briefing circa 1997.

“Sixty seven percent of small and medium sized businesses believe colour is set to become the norm within 2-5 years” – so says a survey recently commissioned and published by Dell.

Leaving aside the fact that there will always be niche applications that require mono laser printing – just as there are niche applications that are best suited for fax rather than email and niche applications best suited to dot matrix printers – the certainty that print is going colour is every bit as assured as the fact that TV is now colour having started in Black and White.

These quotations are made from a standpoint very similar to consumers’ desire to have colour television. It is all about conveying information quickly, effectively and accurately. No doubt many readers will have heard of the classic TV commentary of a snooker match in which the comment was made, ‘for viewers watching in black and white, the pink is just beyond the yellow’!

However, where TVs are concerned, the only downside to making the transition was the one-off cost of the purchase (although there were TV license implications initially) – and no one was in any doubt that it was worth the extra money – but colour printing is an on-going commitment with very different costs to mono printing.

For instance, mono Cost Per Page (CPP) on colour laser printers does not tend (with several notable exceptions) to be much, if any, lower than the mono CPP on colour laser printers. In fact, it is frequently considerably higher.

Yet, for the Lexmark prediction to come true, mono CPP has to fall at least to mono printer levels and preferably lower.

Colour CPP, however, can usually be estimated as being between four times and six times the mono CPP. Where the difference is very high, the manufacturer is usually trying to be very competitive on mono costs to encourage users to make the switch – with the corresponding penalty on the colour CPP.

What we need to focus on is the question of which colour printing technology is best suited to our printing needs – liquid ink, solid ink, four-pass laser or single-pass laser. Users will also need to answer other questions – including: whether they are best served by single-function or multifunction devices; and, of course, which manufacturer’s devices will best match their needs.

Somewhere along the line, we also hope they will consider cost – and not just the purchase cost, which can be very misleading!

Laser technology, and colour laser in particular, is very much held up as the ‘Holy Grail’ of the print environment. When a small business is contemplating its next purchase, the dream machine is almost always colour laser.

But why? Is it just because liquid inkjet has been perceived as too slow and of inferior quality? Or, perhaps it is considered to be old-fashioned? If so, these preconceptions need to be challenged because inkjet machines are no longer painfully slow, print quality is excellent and they are very smart and relatively compact.

For instance, print speed on inkjet printers is always quoted in the fastest draft mode available – a mode that no user in his right mind would have selected even five years ago for anything but the most low-level of draft prints. Now, however, draft mode from Hewlett-Packard inkjet printers produces a print quality that is more than adequate for the majority of print jobs, including customer facing letters. The only proviso is that if the document has significant colour content (other than text and simple lines) the driver settings do need to be uplifted.

In fact, from a personal perspective, at least 95% of my pages are printed in Fast Normal or Draft mode (depending on the printer used). There are absolutely no concerns about quality and each of the printers concerned is set to that print quality as default.

OfficeJet Pro K550
is rated at 37ppm in
mono and 33ppm in
colour (draft mode)

In terms of the scope of this article, we consider only single function devices because the additional functionality on MFPS is the choice of the user. There are multifunctional products available in liquid ink, solid ink and laser – with varying price tags. Here we consider the print function, and associated costs, only.

In order to make a true technology comparison it is vital to select products from a single manufacturer – to eliminate any inter-manufacturer competitive issues. There is only one company that has a full range of products from low-end general purpose inkjet, through business-optimised inkjet and low-end colour laser to medium-speed office workgroup colour laser. That is Hewlett-Packard.

In terms of other manufacturers, Lexmark scores second for breadth of product range, followed by Epson. Others focus to greater or lesser extents on one of the technologies, some with an interest in another technology, constituting a relatively minor involvement.

But comparisons with solid ink need to be the subject of another article. Suffice it to say at this stage that, although solid ink has been billed as the cost-effective solution by Xerox, long-term Cost of Printing is broadly equivalent to, or slightly higher than, the Colour LaserJet range from Hewlett-Packard (depending on models chosen).

Colour printers, as defined above, are available with price tags that range from literally just a few pounds to well over one thousand pounds. This wide price range encompasses an equally wide range of colour printing capability.

For instance, no one would expect a DeskJet 3940, at 4.6 ppm, to be able to push out the same number of prints in a month as the Colour LaserJet 4700, at 30ppm. A user with a high monthly print requirement of 10,000 pages a month would be foolish to expect a low-end inkjet to be up to the task. Equally, a user with a requirement for just 100 pages per month would be foolish to spend £1,220 for the privilege of printing those pages on a high-end colour laser printer.

However, the middle ground is a hard fought space. We have chosen a monthly page volume of 2,500 pages for the accompanying illustrations as a typical figure for a small company or workgroup producing a reasonable quantity of office/business oriented documents per month.

Our calculations are based on 5% coverage of each colour per page (quoted as the standard coverage by printer manufacturers) and on the balance of pages being 70% mono and 30% colour.

Using this throughput to calculate the average Cost Per Page over a three-year period of ownership shows us that within the spectrum of business oriented machines, the manufacturers carefully position prices so that there is little difference between laser printer models (long-term 3yr Cost Per Page). The difference exists mainly between technologies or between significantly differing target markets.

DeskJet 3940

Colour LaserJet 4700

But, how much is the user willing to pay for colour in the office? The CLJ2600n both costs 85% more than the K550 (but is network-ready as standard) and also has a long-term CPP that is 93% higher.

Is it worth it?

It makes the difference between spending £4,182 to print 90,000 pages over three years and spending just £2,018 – a potential saving of 52%.

As page throughput rises, the justification for employing laser technology becomes much stronger to the point where business inkjet simply cannot cope. Whereas the K550 has a maximum duty cycle of 7,500 pages per month, the CLJ2600n has a duty cycle of 35,000 pages and, moving up to the top end, the CLJ4700 has a duty cycle of 100,000 pages per month. Average duty cycle would not normally be expected to exceed 25% of the maximum – meaning that 2,500 pages per month is high, but not impossible, for the K550.

Charting the purchase price against long-term CPP, clearly inkjet is the more economical technology up to the point at which the printer burns itself out from overuse. In fact, it would even be worth buying two networked K550dtn printers (which have twin paper trays and are capable of duplex printing) instead of one CLJ2600n! The saving would still be 45%!

An extra bonus could be acquired by purchasing two OfficeJet Pro K850dn printers at £373 each. Here we have an inkjet printer that is not only network-ready but is duplex capable and prints to A3 format. Overall, the long-term CPP would be 3.35 pence – still a saving of 28% over the CLJ2600n.

Up to the top end of the scale, colour laser printers tend not to have greatly flexible paper handling, so the Business Inkjet 2300, the OfficeJet Pro K550 and OfficeJet Pro K850 must be considered to be serious competitors to laser for standard office applications.

For users with higher monthly volume, hard copy requirements that are more sophisticated than office documents or advanced paper finishing requirements, there is little alternative to laser.

So, as users consider the move from basic mono printing to colour printing, there are choices to be made, information to be weighed, in order to achieve the best solution for their unique environment at the best price.

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 10,000 pages per month using maximum capacity toners and takes into account any standard, or starter, toner cartridges shipped with the printer and includes the purchase price.

(*) Note: Print speed for the inkjet printers is quoted for Normal/Fast Normal print mode to match print quality for laser printers most closely. Fastest print speed is quoted by manufacturer in Draft mode – which may be adequate for most applications. Draft print speeds are (mono/colour): DJ 3940 - 16/12 ppm; DJ 5940 - 30/24 ppm; K550 - 37/33 ppm; BIJ 2300 - 26/22 ppm.

~End~

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 at 12:03 am and is filed under Pricing, Hardware, Print Technology, Comparisons, Financials, Issues, News, 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.