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

Issue #0740/1 - Lexmark has taken a piece of magazine research that focuses on Total Cost of Printing out of context, trying to make PR mileage from a set of data relating to printers that are not intended to be a competitive grouping.

Lexmark has leapt upon some research from PC Magazine with relish as the statement is made that, “For light use, the Lexmark X3550 is the least expensive in the long run …,”. What Lexmark does not reveal is that the running costs of the X3550 over a three year period are actually the highest of all – it is only its low purchase price that pulls the overall cost below the cost of the other printers in the group.

Canon PIXMA MP600

Which leads us to the first question? Which other printers are being compared with the X3550? PC Magazine makes no claim that the printers selected are a competitive group, rather indicating that its goal is to investigate the dynamics of Cost of Printing based on cartridge yield and price.

First of all, it must be made absolutely clear that the X3550 is the slowest printer in the group by at least 20% and up to one-third (mono)! Colour print speed is lowest by a minimum of 23% and as much as 51%!! This is itself is enough to alert potential customers to the product mismatch.

Hewlett-Packard
Officejet J5780

Hewlett-Packard
Officejet Pro K5400

Kodak EasyShare 3500

However, that said, duty cycle on the Hewlett-Packard Officejet Pro K5400 is quoted as 7,500 pages per month, whereas 3,000 pages is quoted for its Officejet J5780, the same as the X3550.

Lexmark X3550

So, although PC Magazine did an excellent job of testing these five devices for Cost of Printing, the choice presents an obvious (and not unintentional) mismatch. Essentially, this is not a comparative group by any stretch of the imagination and most of these devices should never appear together in one table.

At the top end, Hewlett-Packard’s Officejet Pro K5400 is exactly what it says on the box – a professional, heavy-duty business inkjet printer and the only device in the line-up that is not multifunction. Following on, we find the Hewlett-Packard Officejet J5780, with its ADF and fax functionality, at a very keen purchase price compared to the Canon PIXMA MP600 and Kodak EasyShare 5300 which do not have ADF or fax function. This is also clearly an office device, designed for the demanding office with a broad spectrum of hard copy communications requirements.

Moving on to the Canon and Kodak devices, we move into a different field and could easily expect to find either device in a small business or home office environment. Canon’s PIXMA AiOs particularly excel in terms of quality and print speed and are often very cost effective in the long-run, whereas Kodak’s EasyShare printers suffer badly from the 5-colour ink cartridge which is very wasteful on ink.

However, the Lexmark X3550 is a cheap and cheerful, disposable, consumer device with little to recommend it except its low purchase price.

In particular, as mentioned, the Cost of Printing on the X3550 is high. The nominal mono CPP of the X3550 is a horrendous 4.4 cents, not so far short of the nominal colour CPP of the Officejet Pro K5400, and around 57% higher than the mono CPP from Canon and Kodak.

Surprisingly though, the nominal colour CPP from Lexmark is not the highest of the machines quoted. Colour CPP on Canon’s MP600 is at about the same level as the X3550 but Hewlett-Packard’s J5780 has a colour CPP that is about 12% higher. However, the X3550’s colour CPP is 62% higher than the Officejet Pro K5400.

In point of fact, this is where PC Magazine’s methodology is slightly flawed. Basic, nominal CPP has been calculated for each cartridge individually and to only one decimal place. In order to calculate nominal colour CPP, these figures have been added together, again to one decimal place. This results in the potential for cumulative errors to creep in.

Consider the accompanying table, we have used the exact prices and yields presented by PC Magazine but calculated with no restriction on decimal places – only rounded to 2 decimal places for the final result. The cumulative error is most marked on the Canon MP600 where it makes the difference between 9.5 cents and 9.62 cents per page.

Where this has its biggest impact is in the calculation of long term Cost of Printing. However, it is not the most significant loss of accuracy, affecting the total three year cost on 20 colour pages per month by only 86 cents.

Sadly, PC Magazine has used these nominal CPPs as the basis for its long term costs, failing to take into account two important factors.

Firstly, each printer ships with cartridges. These may or may not be full capacity cartridges, in which case some allowance has to be made for the amount of ink supplied with the machine and the fact that the user does not have to buy that first cartridge.

Calculations should therefore, take account of the total out-of-pocket expenditure for the user. The following table again uses the data from PC Magazine but makes allowance for these two factors in the calculation of total spend over three years.

Suddenly we find that the Lexmark is not the least expensive by a 14% margin but is actually second to the much more capable Canon by a whisker but, in point of fact, it is only the Officejet J5780 that stands out from the crowd as being unusually costly.

However, this is nothing in comparison to the picture we see if we look at a range of page counts over three years.

See charts below

Because Lexmark claims a duty cycle as high as 3,000 pages per month for its X3550, we’ve taken a range of page counts from a very low (for the high-end machines) 50 pages up to 2,500 pages per month – a level that the Officejet Pro K5400 would handle without breaking sweat but that would push the X3550 into an early grave, despite Lexmark’s claims.

Cost of Printing

Here we see that the Lexmark is the least costly within this group of mismatched devices at 50 pages per month, because it is really designed for only a few pages per month and has a purchase price to match. Any user with serious printing/copying (and especially faxing) requirements would need one of the higher level machines anyway, as witnessed by the much better Total Cost of Printing of the other printers as volumes rise - we note that the Lexmark very rapidly ceases to be the least costly.

So, if we put a bit more detail into it by restricting page volumes to a range from 50 pages to only 250 pages per month, we find that the Lexmark already exceeds three of these machines on cost by 200 pages per month.

Cost of Printing

But, these charts are purely academic and shown only because this is the line-up presented by PC Magazine and jumped on by Lexmark.

Let’s now have a look at a really competitive selection and see what the position is and where the Lexmark machine falls against the type of printers that buyers would actually be selecting as potential purchases alongside the X3550.

Epson Stylus CX7400

In selecting the printers to analyse, pricing dynamics from Epson in particular made the decision difficult. The CX7400 is rated at 28ppm for both colour and mono printing – considerably faster than the other printers – but has the lowest purchase price. In order to bring the print speed down, we would have been selecting a machine costing a full $20 less. So, we decided to stick with a fairly close price match and accept that the Epson gave better value for money in terms of print speed.

Canon PIXMA MP210

Brother DCP-130C

Hewlett-Packard Deskjet F4180

Note: All prices used here-on have been researched from the US and represent an average typical street price for each item without sales tax or delivery.

What we first notice is that the average street price of the Lexmark X3550 is no longer the lowest, despite having faster, more capable and more reliable printers in the competitive line-up. Only Brother’s faster, more reliable device shipping with PaperPort comes in at a higher price.

All manufacturers quote cartridge yield to ISO 24711 using the ISO 24712 test suite except for Brother, whose test methodology is based on 5% coverage. On the basis that comparative yield figures under a 5% scheme and under the ISO standard tend to indicate that more pages are printed by a cartridge using the ISO standard, we can be fairly certain that Brother’s quoted yields are not giving it an unfair advantage.

Independent testing of a number of devices by CharisCo Printer Labs shows that Brother printers do tend to offer lower Cost of Printing than almost any other competing device. In our experience, the cartridges yield around 10% more black pages than quoted by Brother and around 70% more colour pages. So, we should be able to take these Cost of Printing figures as being at least realistic and possibly pessimistic.

Brother does, however, need to make the transition to the ISO standard for its inkjet printers as a matter of some urgency.

Running the analysis from 50 pages to 250 pages at the same 80% mono and 30% colour page ratio used by PC Magazine, we find that Lexmark is never the least expensive printer to run in the long term, nor is it the least expensive printer to purchase. These calculations are based on making allowance for using the low-yield cartridges shipped with the machine and calculating total out-of-pocket cost to the user before converting to a CPP.

In fact, at the 100-page per month level set by PC Magazine, the Lexmark X3550 proves to be the second most expensive machine to run, with only the Epson costing more. Emphasising the major point being made by PC Magazine, we see that Brother’s DCP-130C is the least expensive printer throughout, despite it having the highest purchase price. In the meantime, Canon and Hewlett-Packard compete hard in the middle ground with Lexmark.

If we then run the analysis with the higher level of monthly printing used by PC Magazine, 200 mono pages and 100 colour pages, we discover that the relative positions change little except that the middle order changes to pull the X3550 down below the cost of both Canon’s MP210 and Hewlett-Packard’s F4180.

Going back to the chart for a moment, it is perhaps surprising that the X3550 is the second least expensive machine in the group, after the Brother DCP-130C, apart from that one point at the 100-page per month level where the purchase of new cartridges very close to the machine’s end of life bumps up the expenditure unfruitfully.

Cost of Printing

So, how do we summarise this situation?

PC Magazine should be applauded for bringing a detailed analysis of Cost of Printing to the market place. The work is of a high standard and very informative.

It is unfortunate that there were a couple of empirical shortcomings to the methodology and understanding that led to the situation where Lexmark could make a claim that is, in fact, both untrue and not founded in reality.

First of all, a comparison should at least compare printers that users might consider choosing between when browsing the shelves. The heavy-duty Hewlett-Packard Officejet Pro K5400 printer should never be compared with the Lexmark consumer oriented X3550 All-in-One.

Secondly, the nominal CPP of a cartridge cannot simply be multiplied up to provide an overall Cost of Printing after a given time period. The analysis must be based on total expenditure at a given end-of-life.

Bottom line though is that Lexmark printers are ‘almost never’ the least expensive to run over a period of time and it was irresponsible of Lexmark to jump on this comparison in PC Magazine and treat it as a good, fair and competitive comparison. If you read the article itself, it is clear that the comparison is not intended to produce a recommendation for which printer to buy but rather to explain and illustrate the dynamics at work in Total Cost of Printing and how those dynamics affect the amount of money you will part while you own a printer – a job which it accomplishes very successfully.

~End~

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Comparisons, News, Issues, 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.