BUYER’S GUIDE TO Business colour printers
How do you choose the perfect printer for your office? Dave Mitchell provides a guide for what to look for and reviews four top contenders
In previous issues of PC Pro, we’ve written at length about the benefits of digital document management – but no business can do away with paper entirely. Companies still need to produce hard copies of invoices and reports, contracts for signing or proofing, sales receipts and more. For the foreseeable future, the office printer is here to stay.
While a printer may not be optional, however, there’s a huge range of models to choose from. Whether your priority is price, speed or quali ty, there’s something to suit every need. And the old question of colour versus mono has become almost irrelevant: the cost of colour printing has fallen to the point that there’s little reason to limit yourself with a black and white model.
This month, we look at colour inkjet and laser printers from the biggest names in the industry. We review four models all aimed at SMBs and examine their technology, features, speed and quality to help you make the right buying decision.
Safety in numbers
Our relationship with printers is changing. Many office printers have sat unused for months on end while offices have been on lockdown: now staff are returning to work, but often in smaller numbers, and in more spread-out arrangements than before.
This means that a single, central heavy-duty printer is no longer the obvious choice. It may well make more sense to deploy a few cheaper machines throughout the office,
“Locate your printers in ‘safe spaces’ to help staff maintain social distancing – that is, not right next to anyone’s desk”
which is why we’ve kept prices low this month, with the most expensive model in our guide costing only £322.
Mobile features have come into their own too. In the past, the ability for staff to create and manage print jobs from their smartphones or tablets might have seemed like a luxury: now these capabilities help minimise the need for staff to physically interact with the printer. All of this month’s vendors provide free Android and iOS apps that allow users to print documents from anywhere, only approaching the printer when it’s time to collect their pages.
On that note, consider locating your printers in “safe spaces” to help staff to maintain social distancing – that is, not right next to anyone’s desk. Care should also be taken to keep printer surfaces, touchscreens and control pads disinfected: most printer vendors recommend regular cleaning with a lint-free cloth lightly coated with 70% isopropyl alcohol and 30% water.
Laser or inkjet?
For high-volume printing, a laser printer has always been the best choice. These units are fast, unfussy about paper quality and generally very reliable. They also produce razorsharp text, with colour that’s good enough for presentations and business reports. And because of the way the page image is laid down, there’s no slowdown when printing high-res documents and graphics.
Don’t discount inkjet printers, though. The latest business models combine high-capacity ink tanks with big duty cycles, and their per-page costs now undercut many low-cost lasers. Inkjets are also better at producing bright, detailed colour output, which makes them the natural choice for photo printing.
Inkjet technology has a less obvious advantage too: it’s far more energyefficient than a laser. The inkjet models on review this month consumed no more than 25W when printing, while laser models peaked as high as 980W during their warm-up phase.
The main drawback of inkjet technology is variable printing speeds. Manufacturers may quote a certain number of pages per minute (ppm), but this is normally based on low-resolution printing, while high-resolution output will be much slower. For the best results you may also need to use higher-grade paper, which drives up running costs.
Counting the cost
A printer is a long-term investment. It should last you for many years, and during that time the initial purchase price will pale into insignificance next to ongoing running costs. Even small differences add up: mono printing costs for this month’s models range from 0.9p to 1.9p per page. Those numbers might seem too similar to worry about, but if you print 100 pages every working day, the price difference works out to £253 per year.
The gap is even starker when it comes to colour printing. For the same page count, an inkjet offering 4p colour pages will cost you £1,012 over the course of a year, whereas a laser with colour page costs of 10.4p more than doubles this to £2,631.
This doesn’t mean you should only look at the printer with the lowest running cost, but it’s important to work out a realistic estimate of your current and future printing volumes so you can weigh up the true cost of the various options.
Businesses with high printing demands may consider signing up for a managed print service (MPS), where a fixed monthly fee covers the cost of the printer, maintenance and all consumables. Indeed, the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-C529RDTW ( see
p98) is only available on an MPS contract, with a basic three-year plan costing £49 per month. This allows you to print up to 3,600 mono pages and 2,400 colour pages per year, and know that your annual cost will be precisely £588. Needless to say, however, you don’t get any money back if you end up printing fewer pages than anticipated.
Print safe
When it comes to security auditing, printers are easily overlooked – but they can be a prime target for hackers. Make a point of changing the default administrative password immediately, keep the firmware up to date and disable any features you aren’t using, such as SNMP management, FTP access or internal email services.
Think about the security of your printouts as well – after all, you don’t want confidential documents left in the output bin for all to see. Look for a “walk up and print” option, which allows you to hold private documents at the printer until a PIN is entered at the control panel to release them.
User access controls can add extra security and save money by restricting who is allowed to print. Some models support page quotas and usage auditing, and may let you limit colour printing to specified users.
The four printers on review this month offer a wide range of features, print speeds and paper-handling capabilities. All, however, have low purchase prices, making them ideal for SMBs as well as larger businesses looking to update their printing provisions. Read on to see which one suits your post-pandemic needs.