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

Issue #0806/1 - Having launched the highly specified entry-level Phaser 6130 colour laser printer in November 2007, Xerox has now added a host-based model to its range – Phaser 6125 – with effective street pricing that knocks the competition off the field. This model bridges the gap between the very low-end four-pass Phaser 6110 and the Phaser 6130 with its PCL6 emulation and Adobe PostScript 3. Note: this article should be read in conjunction with the article "Phaser 6130 - Fuji Xerox challenger to new Samsung CLP-350N" in TCPglobal Issue #0736.

This next two paragraphs were supposed to appear later in the article and read:
Turning to purchase price, what we find is that, being a new model, the Phaser 6125 is typically priced at the upper end of the range. This is not entirely surprising bearing in mind that it is a new engine design offering relatively fast colour printing. Even a couple of the four-pass printers cost as much as, or more than, the Phaser 6125. It may be that its price will fall over the course of the next few months.

Xerox Phaser 6125

Compensating for the apparent upper end price of the Phaser 6125, however, is the inclusion of a free colour toner pack – worth approximately £85. On a purchase price of £158 (ex tax), this brings the real price of the printer itself down to around £73 – which would be a phenomenal price for a colour laser printer!!

However, just today the price of the Phaser 6125 in the store being used for this comparison dropped by a massive 18% from £158 to £129 – and the free toner pack offer still applies! So, the analysis in this article is based on the latest pricing, putting the Phaser 6125 firmly in a competitive position in the middle of the group at purchase.

With the free toner pack, the effective street price of the printer is now just £44 – more than a phenomenal price for a colour laser printer!!

Typical Street Price (ex. Tax)

This leaves Konica Minolta’s magicolor 2530DL and Samsung’s CLP-350N standing a significant head above the other models on purchase price.

At the other end of the price scale we find that the Xerox Phaser 6110 can currently be bought at the lowest price of all – even lower than the model from engine manufacturer Samsung - CLP-300N. These two are the slowest engines in the group (for colour printing), also having been on the market for well over a year.

Dell is, as usual, bucking the trend here, currently offering a network-enabled 1320c at the same price as the standalone version would normally be – £119 – whereas the cost of a network-ready model in November 2007 was £129. This offer may very well be partly in response to Xerox’s launch of the network-ready Phaser 6125.

Going for cost of toner, however, both Xerox machines are rather predictably expensive, and not affected by today’s hardware price crash – the Phaser 6110 having the most expensive colour toner in the group. The cost of the black toner is exceeded only by Samsung in its CLP-300N.

Best value toner comes, again predictably, from Konica Minolta but Dell and Hewlett-Packard are both hard on Konica Minolta’s heals – as is toner for Samsung’s CLP-350N.

Total Cost of Printing

Pushing all the prices together into a long-term cost per page, the lowered hardware price of the Phaser 6125 cannot counteract the high toner pricing and pull it down from its overall position in the upper half of the field once the initial starter toner and free colour toner pack have been exhausted.

But, note that the combination of low purchase price and free toner pack result in the Phaser 6125 being the cheapest printer to own if monthly page volumes are at the 100-page level or lower. This makes the Phaser 6125 a fantastic deal for the micro business with little to print but with an occasional print need that includes high quality customer-facing documents.

No colour toner will need to be bought for the Phaser 6125 unless the machine is printing around 135-140 pages per month (or around 6-7 pages per day). So, for very low volume users, the Phaser 6125 is a great purchase – but, beware of the cost at high print volumes.

Typical Street Price (ex. Tax)

Note that the mixed mono/colour CPP over three years shown in the accompanying chart: is calculated on the basis of 70% pages printed in mono and 30% pages printed in colou; 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 typical street prices without tax.

Consistently much more attractive at almost all levels of printing is Samsung’s CLP-350N. But, 7 pages per minute has to be sacrificed to the Phaser 6125 on colour print speed while gaining only 3ppm in mono print speed.

Competing hard with Samsung though, at all levels other than the lowest monthly print volumes, are the magicolor 2530DL from Konica Minolta and Dell’s 1320cn.

Konica Minolta
magicolor 2530DL

Konica Minolta’s CPP jumps around more than any other in the chart because its toner cartridges yield a fantastic 4,500 pages each. This means that, although they don’t need replacing as often, and also cost less per page, the user has a fairly large out of pocket expense each time a replacement is required.

At a hardware level, using the same engine as the Phaser 6130 it complements, the Phaser 6125 lacks the advanced Page Description Languages (PDLs). In addition, partly because it is equipped with half the RAM of the Phaser 6130, the 6125 does not offer several of the more advanced productivity features: banner sheets; secure print; proof print; and RAM collate.

What it does still offer as a standard feature is network connectivity – hence making the comparison here strictly a network-ready comparison.

Even small companies and home printer installations find network connectivity to be valuable – with many homes now sporting several PCs and/or laptops, all with internet connectivity requirements. As soon as multiple access internet connectivity is involved, with the use of a DSL modem/router, the addition of a network printer, instead of a standalone, is a no-brainer.

We see Lexmark, in particular, increasingly equipping its inkjet All-in-Ones with wireless network interfaces and other manufacturers, such as Brother and Hewlett-Packard, also with both wired and wireless network-ready inkjet AiOs in their ranges.

Thus, for devices at the bottom end of the colour laser categories – printers and AiOs – to be network-ready, makes a great deal of sense. It is Canon that particularly loses out here by not including network-ready devices in its low-end range.

In terms of print speed, the Phaser 6125 is still looking at 16ppm in mono and 12ppm in colour (like the Phaser 6130). Compared with other printers in the entry-level category, the Phaser 6125 is definitely fast enough to present an attractive option.

Even though the Konica Minolta magicolor 2530DL prints at 20ppm in mono and the Samsung CLP-350N prints at 19ppm in mono, the 16ppm offered by the Phaser 6125 is not a sufficient handicap to make the machine unattractive.

Xerox Phaser 6125

In fact, at 12ppm in colour, the Phaser 6125 (together with the Dell 1320cn – built on the same Fuji Xerox engine) is the fastest colour printer in the category by a minimum of 50% and is as much as 3x the speed of several printers.

Moreover, with five printer vendors playing in this market, only three are engine manufacturers and only two are exclusively offering printers that they have built themselves. These are Konica Minolta and Samsung.

Although Xerox (in the form of Fuji Xerox) is also an engine manufacturer, it takes engines from other manufacturers when the market positioning dictates it as being the most appropriate course of action.

What Xerox/Fuji Xerox has not proved yet is that it can build an-entry level colour laser All-in-One device cost-effectively. Both of Xerox’s low-end colour laser AiO devices are built by other manufacturers – Phaser 6110MFP by Samsung and Phaser 6115MFP by Konica Minolta.

In summary then, Xerox’s Phaser 6125 is a valuable addition to its range and to the market. However, even with the free toner supplied with the machine at this very low price, it does not compete very favourably on Total Cost of Printing with several of the other printers at typical business print volumes.

One final comment though. Marketing literature can often let a printer manufacturer down. In this instance, Xerox’s claim is that it is launching “its most affordable colour laser printer”.

All too often this is misconstrued because what is really meant is that the printer has the lowest purchase price rather than being the most affordable – which strongly implies long-term cost and not purchase price.

Xerox’s Phaser 6125 is indeed its “lowest price colour single-pass laser printer yet”, as claimed in the press release. Only the four-pass Phaser 6110 costs less to buy.

But, in addition, it is the most affordable Xerox entry-level colour laser printer with a purchase price on a little higher than the Phaser 6110 but with lower long-term Cost of Printing. To find printers in the Xerox range with lower long-term costs than the Phaser 6125 would mean spending considerably more up front.

~End~

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 12:03 am and is filed under New Products, Hardware, Pricing, Comparisons, 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.