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

Issue #0705/1 - Just a few pages a day or a busy office? Is laser the right choice and, if so, which of the ultra low-end sub-£250 colour laser printers is the most economical for the amount of colour you will print?

When making a choice of colour printer, how many buyers of entry level machines consider anything more than purchase price? Good question.

Perhaps they will consider the ticket price of the consumables but more likely to be considered is the print speed, availability of interfaces or simply the brand. All of these are perfectly valid criteria and should not be ignored under any circumstances.

What do buyers have to gain by doing just a little bit of sensible pre-purchase research? Another good question and one to which the answer is – plenty!

Focusing on the pricing and Cost of Printing aspects, we take a look at the potential for achieving discounts at the point of purchase and how the number of pages that the buyer expects to print, as well as the proportion of colour pages to mono pages printed, might affect the decision.

Beginning with discounting, Figure 1 shows the results of calculating the percentage difference between manufacturers RRP and prices found on the street. These are the lowest street prices that could be found, for both hardware and supplies. While RRPs are shown excluding tax, street prices are shown including tax. The reason for this is simple, it instantly emphasises any product where there is no discounting on the street.

For instance, the positive percentages seen here for the Dell 3110cn show that there are no discounts applied to Dell products. Put simply, the price from Dell is the price from Dell. There is no opportunity for customers to find sources of Dell equipment at cut-price rates (there are actually some instances where Dell hardware can be purchased from non-Dell sources in the UK but these tend not to carry any Dell warranty and are therefore ignored.

In the same vein, it is interesting to note that there are only two other prices showing no discount at all. The more significant of these is the Phaser 6110 hardware from Xerox (therefore showing a positive 17.5% difference).

All other hardware and consumables are discounted to at least the rate of Value Added Tax (UK – 17.5%). This is displayed as a zero percentage – for instance, colour toner for Lexmark’s C500n is discounted to exactly the rate of tax while mono toner is discounted slightly more. With the hardware being further discounted, long term CPP is down slightly more than the rate of tax.

Even though Xerox hardware shows no discounting, supplies show an amount of discounting average (or even above average) to the group. One might understand that discounting on Hewlett-Packard hardware is higher than average but the highest hardware discounting comes on Canon’s Laser Shot LBP-5000, where we see prices approaching 40% below the ex. tax RRP level.

Since one of the original goals was to compare low-end laser with business inkjet, the Hewlett-Packard Officejet Pro K550 has been left in. Here we see discounting to be more-or-less average with heavier hardware discounting than most.

So, let’s now consider the impact this has on the Total Cost of Printing by comparing the RRP chart presented in TCPglobal Issue #0634 "New low-end colour from Konica Minolta Huge drop in purchase price" (Figure 2.) with a chart that substitutes street prices for the RRPs (Figure 3.) - see charts below.

Firstly, we must note that hardware pricing at street levels varies much, much more than it does at RRP levels. In particular, we find that the Canon LBP-5000 colour laser printer can be found for a price that is almost as low as the Hewlett-Packard business inkjet machine – impressive – meaning that this machine plummets from being averagely priced to being very aggressively priced at a point way below the price of all the other laser printers.

In general, hardware street discounting has made most of the laser machines a little more competitive to the inkjet machine. The two printers this leaves out in the cold are the Dell 3010cn and the Xerox Phaser 6110, neither of which are discounted at purchase and both suddenly appear somewhat uncompetitive to buy.

Most of all, this is significant to the Dell machine, second highest priced machine at RRP and now the highest priced by a considerable margin at street price.

This scenario also rolls through into Total Cost of Printing. Although all supplies are discounted to some degree on the street, there is just the one exception – Dell! As with the purchase price, the lack of street discount on Dell supplies means that the nominal CPP for both mono and colour fail to be competitive in the way that they are at RRP.

By the time the overpricing on hardware is taken into account, the long-term Cost of Printing actually rises above the level of the Xerox Phaser 6110 and Lexmark’s C500, making it the most expensive machine on the market for long-term running.

With Canon’s heavily discounted LBP-5000 not supported by comparable supplies discounting, and Hewlett-Packard’s CLJ 1600, Canon’s LBP-5200 and Konica Minolta’s magicolor 2500W sitting in the middle ground, none of the laser printers can challenge the Hewlett-Packard business inkjet machine for best Cost of Printing.

Note that for this level of machine, the mixed mono/colour CPP over three years shown in the accompanying tables is calculated on the basis of 2,500 pages per month; is based on the use of maximum capacity supplies; takes into account any standard, or starter, supplies shipped with the device; and also includes the cost of purchase. Prices n Figure 2 are manufacturer’s recommended prices, without tax, and prices in Figure 3 are lowest street prices found, including tax.

Discounting would have to be far too deep in order for any laser printer to match the low Cost of Printing brought to market by the Officejet Pro K550. Overall Cost of Printing is as low as two pence per page on a purchase price that is only just over £100! For general office use, there is currently no better colour printer for the cost-conscious.

At this point it should be clearly noted that the figures used so far are based on a high monthly page count, representing a busy office. At a rate of 2,500 pages per month, a company would be printing 120 pages per day.

Now, this is not impossible, particularly bearing in mind the desire by printer manufacturers to push colour printers into the market as the only office printer needed. At the 70% mono to 30% colour balance used in these calculations, a company would be printing 84 mono pages and 36 colour pages. The big issue lies in the question, ‘what type of organisations are buying printers at this level’?

Clearly, the low purchase pricing makes the low-end laser printer very attractive to the small company or small workgroups. But there is still the issue of the cost of consumables representing a barrier to colour printing. To take just one example, a small workgroup of six people, known to me personally, has printed more than 4,000 pages in four months – and with a balance of almost exactly 70% mono to 30% colour.

Interestingly, at the time of purchase, the criteria that were imposed by the IT staff in the organisation for machine selection were primarily based on the fact that it had to be laser. Secondly, it had to be a multifunction device and, thirdly, if it could be bought for a budget of less than £500, there was the option for it to be colour. The fact that inkjet was deemed to be unsuitable for use in the organisation, is typical of the ‘Holy Grail’ thinking that laser is the only way forward for anything other than home use and that ink is inferior.

Inkjet would have provided perfectly adequate print quality for the environment, would have been very much quieter (some of the four-pass laser printers are horrendously noisy for a small office) and would have been cheaper to buy and to run. But, there we go!

However, the low purchase pricing on entry-level colour laser has also made the category very attractive to corporations, where the supplies costs are easily lost in amongst departmental stationery budgets. Here, we may very well find a considerably higher page count.

Finally, price erosion has brought the colour laser printer within reach of the one-man company where the ‘Holy Grail’ factor pushes purchases upward from inkjet simply through a misguided belief that laser provides better print quality at faster print speeds. Here, we may very well find low page counts and colour content that barely justify the high cost of printing on a laser printer.

So, to reflect these various environments, we’ve also run the Cost of Printing calculations on a page count of 1,000 pages per month (48 pages per day) and 250 pages per month (12 pages per day) to try and offer Total Cost of Printing figures that should cover almost every user environment. The inkjet printer from Hewlett-Packard has still been included to ensure that we maintain that comparison between laser and inkjet.

In addition, we’ve run the calculations to make provision for the smaller office that tends to print in colour more-or-less by default (because they can), by reversing the percentages to reflect a balance of 70% colour pages against 30% mono.

These data sets are rolled up into two charts – one chart for users printing a high mono page balance, 70% mono and 30% colour (figure 4.), and the other for users printing a high colour page balance, 30% mono and 70% colour (figure 5.).

Primarily, we note that all printers cost less per page when more pages are printed on them. However, sticking with the standard 70% mono and 30% colour page balance to begin with, we note that there is some position-switching as print volume increases.

Most significant is the crossover between the Konica Minolta magicolor 2500W and the Canon Laser Shot LBP-5000. This is down to the fact that the Canon uses single-piece cartridges with a low page yield (2,500 black and 2,000 colour), while the Konica Minolta not only uses high-yield toners (4,500 pages) bit these are combined with a separate drum unit that has a relatively high yield (11,250 four-colour pages).

Unfortunately, the fact that the magicolor has 1,500-page starter toners means that the colour set has to be changed for the expensive 4,500-page units quite early whereas the units for the LBP-5000, although changed earlier, are considerably less costly per unit. The effect this has on the Total Cost of Printing is that there is high, and early, expenditure on the magicolor whereas expenditure on the Canon is early but relatively low.

By contrast, the high-yield toners and separate drum of the magicolor ensure that at high volumes the toner and drum usage offers better cost-efficiency than the Canon.

Long-term Cost of Printing by monthly page count over 3 years - 70% mono pages / 30% colour pages

(with comparison to business inkjet) Figure 4.

Note that the Hewlett-Packard OfficeJet Pro K550 is Business Inkjet Model

To a lesser degree, we note that the Lexmark C500, most expensive at 250 pages per month, just undercuts both the Dell 3110 and the Phaser 6110 at higher volumes. This is because the C500, although shipping with very low toner capacity (1,000 pages per cartridge) actually has full capacity cartridges that offer a reasonably healthy yield – 5,000 pages for black and 3,000 pages for each colour.

Users may very well hope not to have to replace an imaging or transfer belt when printing a low volume like this but some might hope not even to need to replenish the colour toners!

At the level of 250 pages per month used here, a user will print 9,000 pages over three years. If we calculate at our standard mono to colour page balance of 70/30 (in favour of mono), then only 2,700 of those pages will be colour.

At this level, all of the printers in this group will require a toner change during the life of the printer. It only takes a drop to 185 pages per month (just under 9 pages per day) for the Canon LBP-5200 (with a 2,000-page starter toner) not to need a colour toner change within three years – not what the manufacturer wants!!

This is the reason that most other manufacturers ship printers in this category with enough toner for only 1,000 colour pages. Xerox takes this a little further by shipping with only 800 pages-worth of toner (in a cartridge that yields only 1,000 pages at full capacity. Under these circumstances, if printing 30% colour pages, the user will need to change the colour toners at a monthly volume of only 64 pages (3 pages per day). Any user printing a volume this low would be spending over 11 pence on each and every page printed – 56% more than the spend on an Officejet Pro K550 at 64 pages per day.

Because the suggestion is that low-volume users print most pages in colour by default, we need to reverse the page balance to 30% mono and 70% colour to find out what happens here.

Long-term Cost of Printing by monthly page count over 3 years - 30% mono pages / 70% colour pages

(with comparison to business inkjet) Figure 5.

Note that the Hewlett-Packard OfficeJet Pro K550 is Business Inkjet Model

Under these circumstances, the Xerox toners would need changing after a page count of only 27 pages per month (1.3 pages per day) – this is what the manufacturers are seeking when they ship laser printers with such small toner cartridges!

This would mean that the basic cost of hardware, with no additional toner, would be nearly 23 pence per page in comparison to 15 pence per page on the Officejet. As soon as the user prints that 28th page each month and buys a new set of toners, the added spend is £117 (half the cost of the printer), thus pushing the cost per page up as high as 33.5 pence per page if no further pages are printed.

Having spent the extra money on replacement toners, the user can then run the page count up to 67 pages per month (still only 3.2 pages per day) before another colour toner change is required.

Sticking with the 30/70 page balance (mono to colour), figure 4 shows us that the relative positions between printers changes very little, with the most notable difference being that both the Lexmark C500 and the Phaser 6110 are a fraction more economical at low volumes than the Dell 3110. However, as volumes rise, whereas the Lexmark maintains its relative economy against the other two, the Phaser becomes as expensive as the Dell.

At the lower end of the group, it is the Canon LBP-5200 that separates itself out as being the most economical laser printer at all print volumes and regardless of mono to colour page balance.

In conclusion then, although high hardware discount makes a significant difference, particularly encouraging customers to buy the machine in the first place, discounting on supplies proves to be most critical in determining which printer will be most economical to use in the long term.

Potential buyers must consider print volume as a matter of priority within the decision-making process but the proportion of colour pages to be printed has less effect on relative economy from device to device. Depending on print volume, users of some laser printers will end up spending almost double the money they would spend on a different machine.

But, none of the laser printers can stand against the Hewlett-Packard Officejet Pro K550 inkjet printer, which could cost low-end users as much as two-and-a-half times less than a laser printer – and at least 30% less than the cheapest laser machine available.

					70% mono / 30% colour UK pence
Uk	Purchase	Print Speed   ppm		Nominal CPP   pence	250 pages per month	1,000 pages per month	2,500 pages per month
Canon Laser Shot LBP-5000	£120	Mono Colour	8 8	1.57p 8.79p	4.68p	3.97p	3.99p
Canon Laser Shot LBP-5200	£176	Mono Colour	19 4	1.55p 6.34p	3.91p	3.43p	3.15p
Dell 3010cn	£246	Mono Colour	25 5	1.98p 11.01p	7.42p	5.33p	5.18p
Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 1600	£168	Mono Colour	8 8	1.60p 8.03p	5.08p	3.92p	3.83p
Hewlett-Packard Officejet Pro K550	£104	Mono Colour	12 10	0.84p 4.36p	2.67p	2.07p	1.95p
Konica Minolta magicolor 2500W	£171	Mono Colour	20 5	1.42p 7.77p	5.91p	4.07p	3.42p
Lexmark C500n	£187	Mono Colour	31 8	2.13p 10.40p	7.64p	5.13p	4.77p
Xerox Phaser 6110	£221	Mono Colour	16 4	2.20p 11.32p	7.35p	5.55p	5.15p

p = UK Pence

~End~

This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 12:03 am and is filed under Hardware, Supplies, 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.