With the advent of "document centres" the differences between the traditional office copier, scanners and network printers are blurring. We compare some of the top products in this emerging field.
What is larger and has more features than your average laser printer yet smaller than a printer's workshop? No, not a Ford Laser! A document centre. Document centres are designed for organisations that have a steady demand for relatively low volume but high quality and semi-professional print jobs--jobs that require features such as scanning, faxing, collating, and binding in both colour and mono on a variety of stock.
Close attention, consideration, and research into your company's printing needs must be made before taking the plunge into committing to a full-blown document centre to ensure that the ROI is sufficient to provide time and cost savings over your traditional printing methods (generally, external professional print houses).
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The Oki and Kyocera, for example, are more your large-scale high-volume/quality multi-format colour laser printers, with fewer built-in features than the likes of the Canon, Ricoh, or Fuji Xerox offerings. The Kyocera did not even include the ability to scan or photocopy and therefore the cost is naturally lower.
Some of the standard features combined in most of these devices include: integrated network printing, fax capabilities, colour scanning and photocopying, and document storage and management. The Ricoh Aficio 1232C and the Canon iRC3200 that we were sent for testing also included stapling features too.
Some special features included a colour touch screen control on the Canon IRC3200, and a integrated Web interface such as the one found on the Fuji Xerox Document Centre C400. Some of the units even featured an inbuilt e-mail gateway that allowed you to e-mail scanned jobs straight from the unit to an individual e-mail address or even a group of e-mail addresses from the document centre's own address book (or via a global server-based address book).
