Issue #0717/1 - Newcomer from Xerox doesn’t quite compete hard enough on Cost of Printing in the fast mono laser printer category despite being a highly specified machine with some unique features.
Although there are hundreds of mono laser printers on the market, when it comes to fast black and white printing in an A4 printing format for the office, there are relatively few manufacturers that offer a solution.
Of those that do, two manufacturers currently have two offerings, at 43ppm and at either 47ppm or 52ppm. It is Lexmark that has 43ppm and 47ppm from its T642 and T644 while Hewlett-Packard offers 43ppm and 52ppm from its LaserJet 4250 and 4350 respectively.
Joining these two manufacturers are only Dell (with its Lexmark-built solutions) with a 47ppm printer, Kyocera Mita with its FS-4000 running at 45ppm and Xerox with a new model, the Phaser 4510, rated at 43ppm.
Newly announcedRicoh SP 5100N (Americas)
Stop Press: Ricoh has, today, announced a new 45ppm mono laser printer (Aficio SP5100N) in the Americas. This is Ricoh’s fastest A4 mono laser printer but insufficient information is available at this time to include it in this comparative line-up. There does not appear to be anything particularly remarkable or noteworthy about this printer except to confirm that it is duplex ready as standard. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature is that it is competitively priced at $1,199.
Xerox’s new model holds significant benefits to the user in relation to its predecessor, the Phaser 4500, even though it is based on the same print engine.
This includes a speed increase from 35ppm to 43ppm but one of the most significant benefits is an 18% price decrease between the two models from £819 for the Phaser 4500 down to just £670 for the base model Phaser 4510.
And, this is not all. There is a significant price reduction on consumables and maintenance kit as well. We see a 5% reduction on the standard toner, 6% reduction on the high capacity toner and a massive 34% reduction in the cost of the maintenance kit.
In the long run, over three years printing 10,000 pages per month, these price adjustments make a healthy 16% reduction to the Total Cost of Printing. For lower print volumes, say 5,000 pages per month, the overall cost reduction is actually higher at 18.6%.
Unfortunately this doesn’t make it the least expensive machine in the class to run, be any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the reductions do little more than keep pace with the competition.
Comparing the Duplex / Twin paper tray / Network versions of each model in the fast A4 mono laser printer class (40ppm and upwards), amongst the 43ppm printers the Phaser 4510N (+D +T) competes very closely with Hewlett-Packard’s LaserJet 4250dtn but does not quite undercut it. It does, however, look very much more attractive (with its 1.17 pence long term CPP) than Lexmark’s T642dtn at 1.4 pence.
Xerox Phaser 4510NAs we move up the speed scale, we see the 47ppm model from Lexmark showing a lower long term CPP than the 43ppm model – exclusively because it accepts extra-high capacity toner cartridges instead of the regular high capacity cartridges.
Lexmark T642 / T644 dtnThis involves a shift from 21,000 pages per cartridge to 32,000 pages. Dell also has a 47ppm model based on the same engine but that is limited to 30,000 pages from each extra-high capacity cartridge. Its regular high capacity cartridges are also of lower yield than Lexmark’s, at 20,000 pages.
Typically high on Cost of Printing, Lexmark’s figure of 1.12 pence here only just undercuts the 43ppm models from Hewlett-Packard and Xerox – which both have rather lower capacity toners (20,000 from Hewlett-Packard and 19,000 from Xerox).
Dell is typically low on its Cost of Printing in comparison to Lexmark (RRP). Here we see an 18% disparity bringing a long-term CPP of less than a penny (0.92 pence).
Not even this can match the low CPP from Kyocera Mita though. At just 0.69 pence per page printed over three years (10,000 pages per month) from this 45ppm machine, Kyocera Mita beats the competition by as much as 51%! Even against the Dell 5310, it comes in with a 25% advantage.
Kyocera Mita FS-4000DNOne of the remarkable points we notice here is that the Kyocera Mita FS-4000DN (+T) has a hardware purchase price that is not the highest in the group by a large margin and is actually undercut only by the Dell 5310n (+D +T) and Lexmark’s T642dtn.
This means that the historical barrier (high hardware purchase price) preventing printer users adopting Kyocera Mita as a low cost, low entry solution no longer exists. We can see clearly that it is now possible to buy a Kyocera Mita printer at a price low down the competitive scale – and then benefit from the low-cost ECOSYS engine design that gives the lowest toner prices and Cost of Printing on the market.
| Uk - Mono |
Purchase Duty Cycle |
Print Speed |
Nominal CPP |
Long-term CPP CPP over 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Lexmark T642dtn |
£914 225,000 |
43ppm | 1.10 pence | 1.40 pence |
|
Xerox Phaser 4510n (+D +T) |
£1,172 200,000 |
43ppm | 0.81 pence | 1.17 pence |
|
Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4250dtn |
£1,319 200,000 |
43ppm | 0.71 pence | 1.14 pence |
|
Kyocera Mita FS-4000DN (+T) |
£1,026 250,000 |
45ppm | 0.30 pence | 0.69 pence |
|
Lexmark T644dtn |
£1,099 250,000 |
47ppm | 0.78 pence | 1.12 pence |
|
Dell Workgroup Laser 5310n (+D +T) |
£906 250,000 |
47ppm | 0.63 pence | 0.92 pence |
|
Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4350dtn |
£1,645 250,000 |
52ppm | 0.71 pence | 1.23 pence |
At the top end of the high-speed class, Hewlett-Packard’s LaserJet 4350dtn offers us the fastest print speed on the market (52ppm) at a correspondingly higher hardware price. However, with a nominal CPP at the same level as the LaserJet 4250dtn (0.71 pence), the long term Cost of Printing of the LaserJet 4350dtn still falls significantly below the level of the 43ppm Lexmark T642dtn!
To focus on the newcomer to the class, the Xerox Phaser 4510, we find a competent, highly specified machine.
Even though the print speed is at the lower end of the scale within this class, Xerox claims that it will maintain that 43ppm even at full resolution (1200dpi) – when printing at high resolutions, many printers slow down so that the engine speed does not run ahead of the data handling process.
Dell WorkgroupLaser Printer 5310n
This success is partly down to the use of a 533MHz processor in comparison to processors ranging from 514MHz in Lexmark’s T644 and Dell’s 5310 down to the 460MHz processor used in the two Hewlett-Packard models.
Paper capacity also starts at a healthy 700 sheets from the two standard paper trays in the base model to 1,250 sheets in the DTN model and a configurable maximum of 1,800 sheets.
This compares to a paper capacity of 600-sheets on the base models from all the other manufacturers. However, the Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark models are all capable of accepting 4,100 sheets as a maximum input capacity. Kyocera Mita’s FS-4000 falls in the middle, with a maximum capacity of 2,500 sheets.
In addition to a relatively low maximum paper capacity, the duty cycle of the Phaser 4510 is the joint lowest in the group (together with the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4250) at 200,000 pages per month. This compares to 225,000 from the Lexmark T642 and to 250,000 pages from the remaining four competitors.
Hewlett-Packard LaserJet4250dtn and 4350dtn
Where the Phaser 4510 does appear to have an edge over most other office laser printers is that it features edge-to-edge borderless printing. In fact, this feature has been available in the Phaser 4500 since its launch several years ago but is, nonetheless, a very unusual feature for a laser printer. Indeed, if implemented on a colour laser printer, the result would be an unacceptably high level of toner wastage (at an unacceptably high cost).
Perhaps more significant than these hardware features, however, are the productivity features discussed in last week’s issue of TCPglobal (Issue #0716 "Xerox again targets productivity on office printing – Smart Duplexing" & "Xerox again targets productivity on office printing – Print With").
Even though some of these hardware specifications are not as highly rated as the competition, the Phaser 4510 should prove ideal for a wide range of office environments – particularly where print is a key asset in the activity of the organisation. With few high-speed A4 mono laser printers available, Xerox’s Phaser 4510 is a sharp contender and, with its new low pricing structure, is certainly more attractive than its predecessor.
~End~
