Choosing the right corporate colour printer requires looking at a lot more than just price and print speed. We examine the factors that are crucial to making the right choice.
You have probably heard the saying that you need to spend more to save more. This may well be the case with colour laser printers. If you regularly need to produce colour training manuals, brochures, flyers, newsletters, and reports and are quite sick of paying print shops huge amounts of money, why not consider doing all your colour printing in house?
We looked at five colour laser printers from leading vendors; we also invited Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, Panasonic and Ricoh to submit products, but they were not able to submit products in time or were between model releases. In addition to price, speed and print quality for each printer, we also evaluated the total cost of ownership.
To work out the total cost of owning a colour printer, we asked each of the vendors to supply us with all the service intervals that would need to be carried out if you were to print 60,000 pages per year over three years. This included the replacement of toners, drums, fusers, rollers, belts, waste bottles, and any other components that you would have to replace during this time.
Manufacturers claim that the cost of a typical colour page is 20 cents. This figure is based on 15 percent coverage, which is the standard calculation used by many manufacturers, although it is not entirely realistic. (Printing a typical black page costs about two cents per page at five percent coverage.)
Page coverage is an interesting issue. Industry sources tell us they have found through extensive research that the average colour coverage per page is between 10 and 12 percent. This research took into account all types of printing requirements including business and graphics users. Typically this coverage is made up of 5-6 percent black (K) and 5-6 percent colour (CMY) because colour printers use a certain amount of black toner to darken colours. This also makes black the highest single consumed colour on a colour page.
Replacement toners are relatively inexpensive, ranging from $150 for a black cartridge, to around $500 for a full set of colour cartridges. Fuji-Xerox has made an interesting deal on its 860N printerââ,¬"black toner cartridges are free for the life of the printer. Toner life also varies from a few thousand pages up to 25,000 or more. The type of paper you use will also affect how long certain components in your printer last. If you use coarse or recycled paper then chances are the drum will not last as long. Some printers come with starter toner cartridges, which don't hold as much toner as standard cartridges. While we don't like the idea of starter toners, one of the main reasons vendors use them is to reduce the upfront cost of the printer.
Another interesting area of discussion is the way in which manufacturers quote the duty cycles of their printers. For example, a manufacturer may claim a duty cycle of 50,000 pages per month. However, if this level of activity was sustained for a whole year, it would come to 600,000 pages, which is the entire life expectancy of many of the printers tested in this feature. Aside from the Kyocera, we don't think any of the printers in this feature would actually be able to print 50,000 pages per month for 12 consecutive months. These claimed figures are most likely for a maximum one-off run and not sustained usage.
Features
Most of the printers we looked at could have a hard disk fitted as an option, although none of the vendors included this option in the printers we looked at. By adding a hard disk, the printer doesn't need to wait for data from the network to start processing the print job.
All the printers we received shipped with a 10/100 internal Ethernet card, which will enable you to connect your printer via TCP, IPX/SPX, NetBEUI, EtherTalk, NDS, IPP, and SNMP. Most printers also feature bi-directional parallel, serial, and USB ports.
At this level, printers can also come with paper handling accessories such as extra paper trays, output bins, and duplexers. Some printers come with a multi-purpose tray as standard, which can handle a variety of different paper and envelope sizes. All the printers we looked at could handle A4, A5, A6, B5, Letter, Legal, and Executive paper sizes as well as COM-9, COM-10, C4, and C5 envelopes.
Speed and Output Quality
A typical laser printer can only print colour pages at a quarter the rate of a black and white printer. This is because the page has to go through four passesââ,¬"one for each colour. However, considering that most of these printers can handle between five and 12ppm in colour, this is suitable even for large workgroups.
Manufacturers are usually spot on with their estimates of print speeds in black and white; using a 20-page document and ignoring the time it took to print the first page, we were able to prove this by replicating the manufacturers' claims.
With colour it wasn't quite the same story. Some of the printers were not able to live up to the manufacturers' speed claims.
Another factor that affects the speed at which a page is produced is resolution. Typical colour laser printers can achieve a resolution of 600 x 600dpi. The Fuji-Xerox was able to print at 1000dpi and the Brother and Epson used interpolation to print at up to 2400dpi.
Software
All the printers typically ship with PCL and Postscript drivers. Updates are usually found on the vendors' respective Web sites. Some printers ship proprietary software, which allows clients and administrators to view the status and set the settings of the device. Many also allow the option to check the status or set the properties using a Web browser. It's good to see that the drivers cater to almost all versions of Windows, as well as Mac OS and Linux.
Let's take a look at how each of the printers fared.
Next: Brother HL2600N
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