Issue #0723/2 - Don’t be put off by the thought of having to change imaging drum or install a maintenance kit at some point in your printer’s life – it could be saving you a lot of money.
Some manufacturers criticise their competitors for using a configuration that requires maintenance kits to be installed at intervals through the printer’s life. Kyocera is the manufacturer with the heaviest reliance on this configuration because of the nature of its long-life ceramic drum.
This unit does tend to be expensive to replace, as we can see here with the FS-C5030N, where the maintenance kit costs £439 – more than half the cost of the original printer.
However, what we have to do is to analyse the effect this has on print costs rather than just criticise its raw price. The upside to the situation is that the original unit lasts 200,000 pages and will not normally need changing … for most users.
Monthly page volumes of up to 5,555 pages should be OK for three years on the original drum and fuser units. We can see the effect of this maintenance kit kick in on the chart accompanying article 1 with the point in the line rising slightly at the 6,250-page mark.
But, and this is the key point, in terms of Total Cost of Printing, the need to install this maintenance kit makes next to no difference to the overall competitive situation. There is no way any of the other printers are ever going to match the FS-C5030N for Total Cost of Printing. The only time this configuration would be even slightly annoying would be if the user decided, just after buying the maintenance kit, that the printer no longer met their needs. If on the other hand, users with a page count up around 10,000 pages per month, would benefit enormously from an overall CPP of only just over 2.0 pence with one maintenance kit required in the middle of the term of ownership.
We must conclude, therefore, that to design a printer around a long-life drum gives users significant cost savings. In addition, this design is eco-friendly (one 200,000-page ceramic drum saves 20 x 10,000-page drums integrated within toner cartridges – all of which need recycling, at a cost, if they are not to end up as landfill) as well as being cost-efficient in terms of the time required for user interventions.
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