Colour printer - suggestion?

[theaksy]

Hi all

Wondered what colour laser printers people were using, and how they faired for toner costs? We have a managed service in, but looking to get rid. Need a colour laser in the mean time. Unmanaged we have a Kyocera FS-C5200DN that costs around £400 for a pack of toner! and a couple of HP 2600n that cost around £160 for the pack but don't network particularly well! I haven't compared yields yet, though it is clear we get more from the Kyocera (which is just as well!)

Suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks!

[dhicks]

Suggestions would be appreciated!

You should maybe try and gather some statistics about how many pages you are printing per month / quater, then figure out how much you are paying per page, as that gives you a fairly standard mesurement to compare printers and managed services. Our HP 4600s are costing us 30p per page for a colour full-A4 print, which is expensive, especially with the amount we seem to be getting through. Is there something particularly wrong with your current managed service? They can seem expensive but, when you tot up the costs, printing in general is just expensive, and managed services can offer good value for money. Don't let a bad managed printing service put you off all such services, it might be that you simply need to move to a better service.

--
David Hicks

[Tcsltd]

Theasky, If you want me to look at any prices for just let me know..I can also give you the prices for the consumables along with yields so you can work out running cost. Let me know and I will send you some options!

[theaksy]

I did work out for our 2600ns that is was around 13p which is pretty good, but unfortunately they really dont sit well in classrooms - they're fine for an office where people aren't constantly disconnecting and reconnecting the printer.

Our managed service is incredibly expensive - a previous finance manager set it up and the costs are ridiculous. I have a friend who works at a different print company who has looked a the contracts and can't beleive how badly we are being shafted. So because of that our new finance manager is very against adding to our managed service, and wants to let it die out!

SO at the moment we're left in a difficult position of not really having a stock colour printer. The kyocera is nice, but the toner seems incredibly expensive. We have print management software so I'll try and work out how much it actually costs.

[dhicks]

our new finance manager is very against adding to our managed service, and wants to let it die out!

You don't have to go for an all-or-nothing approach, you can get a device on contract from a different company. As a matter of interest, are you hiring smaller desktop-sized printers from your managed supplier, or proper, big photocopier-sized devices?

--
David Hicks

[Hcc2]

We have a Ricoh A4 colour laser which is on a cost per copy contract. Each page, no matter how much colour is on it, costs £4.88p per copy

(we purchased the printer for £680 and Ricoh provide all on-site maintenance/toners as part of the package)

[stevenwba]

[QUOTE=Hcc2;516822] colour is on it, costs £4.88p per copy
QUOTE]

:O
:O

Nearly £5 per copy, are you sure thats right??

[stevenwba]

The setup we have here, is each classroom, has a cheap £100-150 mono-laser/colour inkjet printer, trying to get everyone one mono laser per classroom, and then it the computer suites we have some oki mono and colour printers for students to print on, we have 2 suites so theres another 4 printers, and staff can do all their bulk printing such as worksheets etc to the 2 networked colour photocopiers, because most of our printing is done on managed photocopiers, its more then halfed out print costs!

[theaksy]

Unfortunately our current chiefs wouldn't go for a contract of any sort, though we are due a new head soon, and our monster contract is due to run out in about a year so there are possibilities in the future.

At the moment we are moving to kyocera for our mono printers for rooms that dont have the managed printers in. They are proving pretty good cost per copy, and have a duty cycle of 100,000. I don't like having too many colour printers as people still print mono on them, at a much higher cost per copy rate. The trouble is, in this case the head of department is willing to pay for the printer out of his own funds so the finance manager is more than happy to go along with it.

HCC2 - could I ask which model you purchased?

[mounters]

I moving all our printers over to Kyoceras at the moment. I've standardised all our colour laser onto the FS-C5300 and I don't think that it expensive at all, especially when I compare it to the Konica Minoltas that they replaced.

@theaksy - You complain the FS-C5200 cost £400 for toner, but look at the yields of the toners and also consider other running costs (drums, waste toner bottles, etc). I used to have a HP 2600 at home and they are ok for single users (if you don't mind that they can die after approx 6K pages) but the toners only do 2k pages (the kyo 5200 does 6K and the 5300 that I use does 12K). To get some ideas of running costs I tend to use Printware.co.uk - Colour Laser Printers, Multifunction Printer, Mono Laser Printers, Toner Cartridges and Printer Ink from brands including HP, Xerox, Samsung, OKI as they give good breakdowns of estimate running costs at different page coverage. Then a speadsheet to compare the capital cost of the device against the running costs to calculate if it is better value to go up or down the range based on the expected usage of the device.

[Hcc2]

Sorry dot was in the wrong place we pay £0.0488 per copy from ricoh

[andyturpie]

We have just moved all our printers to the Kyocera 3920DN monos and the 5200DN colours. We are paying £15.00 a month per printer and £6 per 1000 mono prints and 7 pence per colour. We are saving around 20-30% on our total spend.

[theaksy]

Thanks mounters, that site was excellent help (even if it was owned by the very same company who have the print contract with us!). The kyocera we already have actually works out really well on cost per print, so I've ordered another of them.

[PrinterPal]

Hi,
Very difficult to calculate real colour print costs !
Its ok on copiers as most suppliers give a fixed cost per print but printers have many hidden costs .

We run the Kyocera colour machines because the drums + fusers last the life of the machine.

Just replaced Epsoms running at 30p per colour print in a school with kyoceras at 7p per print any coverage ,free machines no minimum term or minimum billing contract.

Big savings if you get your printers right