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

Issue #0717/3 - Xerox engines dominate the high speed A4 colour printing segment. But, while Xerox offers the highest specification and most advanced features, users must expect to pay more for the privilege while Konica Minolta attacks with a strong offering.

If we now transfer our interest in high-speed printing to the A4 office colour laser printer category, we find Xerox dominating the field. There are only two printers that have a mono print speed as high as 40ppm (unless we move to the A3 format) and both are built on Fuji Xerox print engines.

One of these machines is new, the Xerox Phaser 6360, launched during February of this year, and represents the fastest colour A4 printer on the market. Pitched against the Phaser 6360 is Dell’s 5110cn.

Xerox Phaser 6360DN

Moving down the line, the next machines are the 30ppm Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4700; Epson’s C4200 offering 35ppm in mono but only 25ppm in colour (another Fuji Xerox engine); two new machines from Konica Minolta offering 35ppm mono with 30ppm colour (magicolor 5570) and 30ppm with 25ppm colour (magicolor 5550); and two machines from Oki offering mono printing at 32ppm but colour printing at only 26ppm.

Otherwise, for colour printing, we’re looking at printers falling within the range of 16ppm to 24ppm.

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 5,000 pages per month; 70% pages in mono and 30% pages in colour; 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. All prices are manufacturer’s recommended prices without tax.

We will include the Konica Minolta magicolor 5570D in the line-up here for two reasons: firstly it does at least hit the 30ppm mark for colour printing; and secondly, it is another printer that is recently new to the market. Hewlett-Packard’s Colour LaserJet 4700 is also included because of its 30ppm colour print speed even though it is a full 10ppm slower than the Phaser 6360.

We will not include the new Xerox 8560 solid ink printer (up to 30ppm in mono and colour) because this print speed is in fast print mode that does not give normal correspondence print quality. In order to achieve correspondence print quality, the printer has to be slowed down.

Unfortunately for the other manufacturers, Dell takes the same strategic approach in this sector as it does in the mono laser sector, offering both hardware and supplies at significantly lower prices than any of the competition.

In this instance, the 5110cn hardware costs only a little more than half that of the Phaser 6360dn, the nominal CPP for mono printing is 61% lower and nominal CPP for colour printing is 36% lower. When rolled up to represent a three year period of ownership, printing 5,000 pages per month (70% mono and 30% colour), Dell’s 5110cn will cost a customer some 46% less than Xerox’s Phaser 6360dn and 41% less than Hewlett-Packard’s Colour LaserJet 4700dn and Konica Minolta’s magicolor 5570D.

If we put some street pricing to this, in the way we have a couple of times recently where Dell is concerned, the situation changes but not radically.

Typical Street Prices

In fact, the situation changes more radically amongst the other three machines than against the Dell machine. Hewlett-Packard’s Colour LaserJet 4700 experiences some heavy discounting that not only brings its purchase price very close to that of the Konica Minolta but its supplies are discounted enough for the combination to pull the long-term CPP down below the levels of both Konica Minolta and Xerox – albeit by only a few percent!

More to the point, Dell’s 5110cn is still 28% lower than even the CLJ4700 despite the lack of available discounting from Dell.

Dell Colour Laser
Printer 5110cn

In addition, despite fairly heavy discounting on the Xerox hardware (20%), it still leaves the Dell with a 34% advantage over the Xerox! Konica Minolta’s printer actually comes off less well, with shallower discounting leaving it undercutting the Xerox by only 2.4% instead of 9.7%.

So, the overall message doesn’t change – the Dell 5110cn is a much cheaper way to obtain fast colour printing than the Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 4700, Konica Minolta magicolor 5570 or the Xerox Phaser 6360.

However, is it the most effective printer? To what extent would it be worth paying the higher cost for one of the other printers? Note: duplex and network are standard on all models selected for the comparison.

First of all, there is the fact that the Phaser 6360 prints 5ppm faster in colour than the Dell and 10ppm faster than the closely-priced magicolor 5570 or the Colour LaserJet 4700. Where longer print runs in busy offices are involved, this could easily be a significant factor.

Xerox makes claims for its new Phaser 6360 that are true of the base versions of the printers but not as we consider duplex and network-ready versions. With base memory starting at 256MB, the Phaser 6360 certainly has double the memory of either the Dell 5110cn or the Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 4700 - but the new magicolor 5570 also has 256MB.

Furthermore, at DN level, the Phaser still has 256MB but so does the Colour LaserJet 4700dn, leaving us with three of the four machines having this level of RAM. So, we need to look elsewhere for the competitive advantage.

First page to print was another ‘best in class’ claim by Xerox that just about still stands – probably largely due to the 1GHz processor in comparison to the 867MHz processor used in the magicolor. Both printers claim a first page out time for colour pages as 9 seconds.

Dell’s 5110 falls well behind with a 16 second first page out from a 400MHz processor but Hewlett-Packard claims 10 seconds in Ready Mode from its 533MHz processor.

Where the Phaser 6360 certainly is unique is in its use of the genuine PostScript 3 Page Description Language from Adobe rather than the proprietary emulations used by both of the other manufacturers.

In addition, the Phaser 6360 features ‘Run-On’ black printing, allowing the printer still to print in black even when colour toner is exhausted. This is unusual in a colour printer in this class and may well prove useful in the busy office environment.

Real-time, on-PC, paper tray status would also appear to be a unique usability feature with other on-screen alerts by Printing Scout. The Phaser 6360 also offers banner, poster and booklet printing, together with job accounting data – a high level of usability and management feedback.

Konica Minolta
magicolor 5570D

Apart from the maximum paper capacity of the Colour LaserJet 4700 that stands at 2,600 sheets, the Phaser 6360 outstrips the other machines in the group significantly. Its basic paper capacity is 700 sheets in comparison to 600 sheets from two of the other machines and 650 from the third. Maximum capacity is an impressive 2,350 sheets compared to only 1,600 from the magicolor. Dell offers a maximum capacity of 2,150 sheets.

Konica Minolta’s magicolor 5570 stands out in one respect with the unique offering of an optional finishing unit - comprising 2-bin stapler/stacker – and (apparently) the ability to offer secure password printing without a hard disk. An optional hard disk or compact flash card will allow the machine to offer job accounting, font storage and overlay printing.

Dell offers colour access control on its 5110cn, as does Konica Minolta, a feature apparently not offered by either Hewlett-Packard or Xerox. Dell also offers usage tracking as part of its printer management feature set.

Hewlett-Packard Colour
LaserJet 4700DN

Xerox’s software features include: troubleshooting with PhaserSmart; printer management using CentreWare IS Embedded Web Server, and on-screen user feedback with PrintingScout.

Where the Phaser 6360 is fitted with a hard drive, customers will benefit for a further range of high-value usability and productivity features. These include: Secure, Proof, Personal, Shared, Saved and Personal Saved Print; Print With; Hard disk job collation; PDF-direct print; and extended font/form storage.

All of these factors certainly place the Phaser 6360 as one of the more feature-rich and high-value machines. In addition, every bit as significant, are the productivity features detailed in last week’s issue of TCPglobal (#0716 - "Xerox again targets productivity on office printing – Smart Duplexing" & "Xerox again targets productivity on office printing – Print With") ensuring that the Phaser 6360 is an attractive device for high speed office colour printing environments.

For certain customers these features from Xerox will form a high justification for paying the extra long-term cost of running the printer, especially bearing in mind the higher print speed and the fact that the initial hardware purchase cost is attractive by comparison to all but the Dell 5110cn.

~End~

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Hardware, 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.