Printers - Buy or Hire

[skunk]

We are looking at throwing out all of our printers and getting in one make and as few different models as possible. This should cut down on our toner/ink costs. But it will be a huge outlay.

We are looking at a lease agreement, so that we don't have to maintain them ourselves, get swapout, or have to dispose of the things when the inevitably break.

Does anyone do this, how do you find it?

Can anyone recommend a company that provide this service?

[lindabutler]

We've got a Konica 5440 on a free 3 year loan agreement from LNL printweb on their 'free printers for schools' scheme. you do have to agree to buy a minimun amount of consumables from them over the 3 years but they do have a pricematch guarentee.

have a llok at
http://www.lnl.co.uk/PrintersforSchools.asp

[mrforgetful]

I can't really see a point to leasing a printer, not if you get something reliable like HPs.

5 years here I can only think of 2 printers that have being broken beyone economic repair and we currently have around 50 networked HP Laserjets with very little problems and they go on for years and years.

The only leasing advantage I can see is if you want something extreme like an A3 Colour Laser, ours cost nearly £3000 and doesn't get use much for A3 colour prints!

[Geoff]

We lease photocopiers. I should probably look at leasing for some of our bigger print users. It might work out cheaper, especially if we can get the toner thrown in like we do for the photocopiers.

[cosmicegg]

Buy Hp every time. We have both A4 and A3 colour laser printers. They have been in for 18 months and not one has required engineers attention

[Ryan]

We lease ours. We used to have about 60 inkjets, a Heinz 57 mix of all sorts, from £20 HP desktop printers to more expensive Canon photo printers. After many trips to Cartridge World refilling the blighters, we bit the bullet and got shot of them all and replaced them with 40-odd colour and mono laser printers.

As they're leased, all maintenance, parts, toner are included - i just send an email out for more toner and it comes next day normally. We have no interest in owning printers, what's the point? In a year or two, they'll replace them with brand new printers and it won't cost us any more.

Full page A4 photo prints aren't bad at all - not as good as an inkjet obviously, but certainly acceptable for here. That's the only downside i can think of.

Oh, and we're spending less on our lease than we were spending on ink every quarter

[dhicks]

We are looking at a lease agreement, so that we don't have to maintain them ourselves, get swapout, or have to dispose of the things when the inevitably break.

Good idea. We lease a number of Canon iR machines from TopForOffice. They're actually based just down the road from us, so their response time and service level has been great. These are the large floor-standing "photocopier" style machines. They are actually fairly compact - bear in mind that you generally park a laser printer on a table anyway, they take up the same amount of space when all's said and done. Also, these devices can act as scanners that place scanned files in a network folder, so you don't have to have separate scanners. Make sure you specify that function when you lease them, as that's an option that might not be included by default. You might also have to explicitly state that you want them networked (we have several here that are just used as photocopiers - most frustrating waste of resources) and that you want a decent amount of RAM installed.

You might need to keep a couple of inkjets around for staff who need to print confidential documents that they don't want to send to a shared printer (although I'd try and avoid that). We use HP Business Inkjet 1200s - seperate removeable ink cartridges and print heads. Also worth keeping a decent A3 colour boderless inkjet (preferably continuous ink system) around for printing on specialist media (fancy paper, T-shirts, etc).

--
David Hicks

[skunk]

Ryan, who do you lease from?