The expert view Jon Honeyball

It’s certainly true that the latest high-speed inkjet printers are a huge leap forward compared to the cheap desktop devices of old. They really have been engineered to be office grade, with print speeds that can be quite eye-popping. Cast aside any ideas that all inkjets are slow, with this modern breed rivalling and sometimes beating their laser rivals for speed.

They don’t necessarily provide quite the same crispness as a laser printer because an ink-based system is always going to be more susceptible to ink-creep on the paper stock you choose. But this itself opens up an interesting question: what quality do you actually need? I don’t have data to back this up, but I suspect that over 95% of printouts remain within the walls of the business. So long as printouts are readable and of “good enough” quality, why worry about it?

Then there’s the big question: should you be printing at all? The best way to cut your printing cost is, rather obviously, to print less. I always sign up to “send my invoice via email”, preferably as a PDF. With modern electronic accounts packages, there really is no need for an endless shelf of lever arch files. Document scanning and management has always seemed rather clunky and poorly delivered, though. And, at its heart, is the mistaken view that we should be accepting and handling paperwork anyway.

Manufacturers could also help with costs. My 15-year-old HP Color LaserJet 5550 is a multitray A3 behemoth. But a set of four toners still costs £1,200 plus VAT. I can buy third-party toners from Xerox at half the price. Maybe I should just junk the unit and go inkjet, but it’s hard to believe that a perfectly serviceable printer should be end of life. Or that this pricing for legacy business hardware is in any way reasonable.

My view? Getting away from printing altogether is the best answer. At the very least it should be a serious target.