Colour printers
You don’t need to spend a fortune on a colour printer. Dave Mitchell examines your options and explores the various technologies on offer
You don’t need to spend a fortune on a colour printer. Dave Mitchell examines four options.
Printers were supposed to be dead by now. The “paperless office” has been a buzz phrase for almost as long as computers have been in the workplace – and to be fair, emails have to a large extent usurped written memos, while digital databases have replaced bulky filing cabinets.
Even so, the vast majority of businesses still need to print. Many processes revolve around producing hard copies of invoices and reports; documents need signing or proofing, shipments need consignment notes; and so forth.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to do all your printing in-house. There’s a solid business case for using external print shops for specialist jobs like marketing brochures. But for short print runs, this can be costly, and turnaround time is a factor too. So you might prefer to handle your own printing – and good-quality colour printers are nowadays almost as affordable as their mono cousins.
That doesn’t mean the buying decision becomes an easy one. There’s a range of different technologies and feature sets on offer. In this month’s buyer’s guide, we pick through a selection of colour inkjets, lasers and LEDs from some of the biggest names in the industry – Brother, Epson, Oki and Xerox – to help you make the right buying decision.
We can work it out
A printer is a long-term investment, and the purchase price pales into insignificance compared to cumulative running costs over its lifetime. This isn’t exactly a “hidden” cost – the price of consumables is no secret – but you do need to do a bit of maths up front, or you could end up wasting many thousands of pounds. The only tricky part is predicting your future print volumes. If you identify an occasional need for colour then it might make sense to choose a cheap printer that takes relatively pricey cartridges – but if demand goes up, that calculation could turn out to be costly.
Let’s put some example figures on that: the Oki C332dn, as tested this month, costs less than £100, and produces mono and colour pages for 2p and 11.4p respectively. The Xerox VersaLink C600DN costs over seven times as much, but prints cost just 1.1p and 6.4p. If you only print a couple of black-and-white pages a day, the total cost of the Oki will remain lower for nearly three years, before the Xerox gradually starts to pull ahead. But if you print 50 colour pages every day for a year, you’ll have paid £2,080 in consumables for the Oki, versus a total outlay of £1,168 over the year for the Xerox.
“The price of consumables is no secret – but you do need to do a bit of maths, or you could end up wasting many thousands of pounds”
Print technology
Lasers are still the best choice for high-volume printing. They’re fast, they aren’t particular about paper quality and they tend to be very reliable. They produce professional results, too: you can expect razorsharp text, and even lower-cost models can deliver colour quality that’s good enough for presentations and business reports.
LED printers are very similar to lasers but have fewer moving parts, so they’re slightly cheaper to manufacture. Speed and quality are just as good; the only catch is that some cheaper models can leave a slight but noticeable cross-hatch pattern on areas of single colour.
This doesn’t mean you should discount inkjet options, though. The latest business-grade models combine high-capacity ink tanks with big duty cycles, and when it comes to bright, colourful photos and graphics, they’re still the champions.
Historically, the trade-off with inkjet technology has been high printing costs, but that blanket rule no longer applies: this month, the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-6090DW works out cheaper on a per-page basis than any other printer. However, inkjets do prefer higher-grade paper, which increases running costs. Be aware too that the print speeds quoted by manufacturers are often based on low-resolution draft prints; fullquality printing may be much slower.
One final point in inkjets’ favour is that they consume far less power than laser printers, which makes them a greener choice. The Epson WorkForce printer we tested consumed no more than 36W when printing – while the laser and LED models peaked as high as 1.1kW during their warm-up phase.
Set the controls
Once you’ve invested in a highquality colour printer, your staff may be tempted to make liberal use of it, for both work and personal printing. So before you buy, it’s a good idea to investigate what sort of access controls a printer offers. Some have features in their web management console that allow you to create lists of users and assign them colour permissions or daily page limits; others can use NFC ID tags for local authentication.
It’s also a good idea to educate your staff about appropriate use of printing resources. By default, emails and document copies should be printed in monochrome draft mode, which will keep toner or ink costs to a minimum.
Further savings can be made by using cheap 75gsm paper for draft documents. It’s unrealistic to expect employees to keep feeding in different paper types, however: look for a printer that has (or can be expanded with) more than one paper tray, so it’s easy to select the appropriate media.
A final way to keep costs down is to encourage double-sided printing: all the printers reviewed here have an integrated duplex unit, and you can often set this as the default print mode – although we’ve yet to see a printer that allows you to make it mandatory.
“It may be unrealistic to expect employees to keep feeding in different paper types: look for a printer with more than one tray” TOP There’s a range of connection options to suit different office configurations
ABOVE Double-sided printing is a standard feature on modern business printers
Networking and security
All business-class printers have an integrated Ethernet port; if your workforce is largely mobile, then Wi-Fi services are highly desirable too. Two of the printers we’ve tested this month offer both wired and wireless capabilities, but you’ll have to pick one or the other, as they won’t both work at once.
If you have a lot of remote or travelling workers then it’s also worth looking at internet services: many vendors offer a free email service that allows staff to print from anywhere, by simply emailing attachments to the printer.
If you’re going to make your printer available over the internet, however, security becomes even more important than usual. Change the default administrative password immediately, keep the firmware up to date and disable any features you aren’t using such as SNMP, FTP access or internal email services.
Don’t be daunted by all these options: professional in-house colour printing is easy to set up, and affordable for any small business. Read on for our reviews of four quite different printers, showcasing the range of features, options and prices.
LEFT It’s well worth exploring the options in your printer driver – they could slash your running costs