A new force in enterprise printing has arrived

Your office printer is often seen as standard piece of office equipment that is often taken for granted. It is surprising to know that your office printer can actually play a role in achieving productivity goals and hence impacting your operation’s bottom line.

This is supposed to be the age of the paperless office – but we’re not there yet.

Today’s offices are still hooked on paper. Based on a US study, the average office worker continues to use 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year, and paper use in the typical business is increasing by 22 percent every year.

This is a fact of daily business life that shows little sign of changing any time soon – indeed, 40% of people describe themselves as “paper people” – they like to have the paper in their hands rather than looking at a screen.

What this fact underlines is the importance of the office printer – a piece of equipment so ubiquitous that it is almost invisible, and yet it is clearly a key contributor to office productivity. All day long office staff print, copy and fax documents without a second thought – each individual transaction may seem insignificant but over a year the cost of document handling produces a significant impact on the bottom line.

This is where the choice of printer becomes such an important decision, whether you are a corporate user, a back office in the education or healthcare sectors, or a small scale copy shop or printing house.

For a long time, the conventional wisdom has been that for general back-office applications, laser printers were preferable to their ink jet competitors. Lasers were perceived to deliver better quality output, faster and overall more economically than an inkjet.

Today these conventions are being turned on their heads, as a new generation of inkjet printers hits the market. The question is – can inkjets meet the demands of today’s highvolume MFP users?

What users are looking for in an office printer/copier is a reliable, high productivity department-level multifunction printer – One that delivers high speed simplex and duplex output at a low total cost of ownership, with easy maintenance for less downtime. Additional environmental preferences are lower power consumption and a reduction in the use of paper.

Inkjet printers are known for their simple structure, which in general delivers low TCO with low power consumption, little waste, few parts to replace and few breakdowns. In addition to these basic benefits, today’s inkjet printers feature numerous technological advances that let them meet and even exceed the requirements of the most demanding user.

Leading the inkjet revolution is Epson’s new range of highspeed linehead inkjet MFPs, dubbed the WorkForce Enterprise, WF-C20590. PR