VIEW FROM THE L ABS
A lot has changed in the past 14 years, but are printers still the same? Simon Handby ruminates
Another printer group test just completed and I’m sitting around in the usual fallout: 12 printers, more than 1,000 sheets of printed paper (fear not, I reuse then recycle all of it), and a bin bag full of various plastic, film, foam and polystyrene packaging. I’ve been doing this for 14 years, and the printers kind of still look the same – so what’s actually changed?
Happily, more than you might expect. Digging back in time to my first group test turned up some fascinating results. In 2004, the fastest performances from nine different photo inkjets included 7.6 pages of black text per minute, and 2.3ppm for colour graphics – today’s equivalent is about twice as fast. The cheapest inkjet cost £61 (£92 inc VAT in today’s money) and was a single-function, USB-only device. It delivered text at 1.7ppm, and colour graphics at a stupefying 0.4ppm. You could have drawn them quicker yourself.
Skip forward a couple of months and I wrote my first laser printer labs. In November 2004, the fastest black text result was a zippy 28ppm, but ask the same printer for colour and it was a torpid 5ppm. The labs winner could reach 19ppm in black and 15ppm in colour, but it was a single-function device costing £680 (that’s equivalent to £1,023 today). If you wanted duplex, it was a £265 (£399) option. Contrast that with Xerox’s WorkCentre 6515DNI: 25% faster to print, able to duplex scan, copy and fax, with a massive touchscreen and support for Gigabit and wireless networks, all for less than a third of the inflation-adjusted price.
Of course, printers have got cheaper because they’re more expensive to run, right? Well, not really. 2004 pre-dated the current ISO/IEC 24711 inkjet yield test we use as a reference, so the comparison is approximate, but those nine inkjets averaged 2.7p for a black page and 7p in colour: more than 4p and 10p a page in today’s money. The nine lasers averaged 1.5p in black and 6.8p in colour, so 2p and 10p today.
So what’s my point? A lot has changed in 14 years – even in the beige and black world of printers and multifunctions. The paperless office is yet to materialise, but overwhelmingly, today’s printers are faster, cheaper and have more features – and they cost no more to run. Weird, then, that we’ve never really noticed. Progress, it turns out, is both a wonderful and subtle thing.
“A lot has changed in 14 years, even in the beige and black world of printers and multifunctions. Weird, then, that we never noticed”