does anyone here "rent" their printers?
I havent looked into this yet, but my office manager informed me that we are going to get some new photocopiers, one is going to be networked (thanks for liasing with me). She mentioned that the company they are going to get the photocopiers from also do this printer thing and that apparently its saves the schools a lot of money.
Anyone have any experience of these? I'm assuming its pay per page or something...
Your assumption is right, and it's something we'd look at if all our printers were to be replaced at once.
We were dropped in a similar situation with two photocopiers turning up on the network without our knowledge but it's worked out in our favour ultimately.
Little-Miss (12th January 2009)
Oh yeah, i'm glad that they're finally getting the network ones, makes a lot more sense...Originally Posted by kmount
It may be any idea then because the printers seem to be ganging up on me and failing one by one....at the moment i've got 3 epson C1100 with and 2 seperate errors...Grr
We rent 6 Mono laser printers, the other advantage is when somthing breaks you call and normally within 3 hours we have somebody onsite fixing it.
We pay £14 a quarter rental, then .58 of a penny per copy.
Little-Miss (12th January 2009)
We rent our 6 photocopiers across the school which includes all maintenance / toner etc as part of the quarterly rental.
I would imagine the company is someone like Oce who will install something like pcounter so that jobs of a certain number of pages etc can be automatically rerouted to the photocopiers. Sounds good in principal, but the teachers won't get up to go to the photocopier to get their printouts.
well apparently theres a system in place that stops the job coming through until they put a pin in....so when they do eventually get off their arses they can go release it and pick it up on the way to the staff room or wherever it is....
Yeah, that sounds like pcounter to me. When it re-routes to the copier it won't print automatically they will need to enter their PIN goto their mailbox and then select the necessary job to print.
We lease a lot of printers (all big HP multifunction devices; the company is DTP group)
I'm not sure of the cost but it is basically a fixed cost per quarter and then a (relatively small) charge per page and they provide all toner and maintenance.
Most companies will do something like this - Kyocera do it, for example.
You may be able to do it a bit a time; there's normally no need to replace everything and you do get things like pull printing (where you just send the job to a print queue and it prints wherever you log in or swipe your ID card) included.
Little-Miss (13th January 2009)
If you can find a supplier whose solution doesn't involve PCounter I'd definitely consider that a plus point!
We looked at doing this via Xeretec
They aren't necessarily the cheapest but for our higher-volume colour lasers (which was what we wanted to replace) they were coming in well below what we were paying by buying the printer and toner ourselves. Plus, you're getting Xerox, and I haven't ever been given hassle by a Xerox machine. We were dealing with a guy called Stuart Montague who was always very helpful and very keen to do business with schools (if anyone wants contact details, PM me).
Their solution did not include PCounter, but was based on Xerox Centerware.
Unfortunately I can't comment on the ultimate success of this or service level as the Headmaster decided instead to go for a different and vastly more expensive package from a really bad supplier, against our objections, because the supplier made a huge donation to the school which they are recouping through vastly inflated and overpriced leasing costs.
All of our PhotoCopiers are from iKon Office Solutions... Most are leased, a few we own
They all run through an Equitrac Express system, some of the older ones use Page Counters which provide the same tech as MEAP. Still got the Pull printing and a whole system of billing, reporting and auditing.
I can't find the option anymore, but somewhere in EE it will show us logs of previous jams on printers, a current count of pages printed etc and lots of other funky things.
It's worth keeping an eye on your costs if it's done per-print... because we don't have a clue how iKon worked out how many pages we'd printed, but the value we had was less than the one that they had come up with.
I wouldn't expect any of the photocopy manfacturers to be using pcounter I would have thought they have their own software developed to work with their copiers?
Ben
I take it PCounter = BAD!
Do i turn and run if this is mentioned...?
BAD is maybe overstating it. Clunky and buggy is maybe closer to the mark. It was great under Netware because NDS had a print balance field, but in a Windows envionment it has to keep its own balances database, and it's very buggy.
We use the ICS integration with it and it's a nightmare at times. Like when the cardpin db which links user ID to card magstripe/mifare ID gets corrupted.
Last year at Bett I saw a company offering printer rentals by the page - they apparently had a minature camera inside the printer doing the counting, all of the printers were made by a manufacturer I'd never heard of though.
Edit: I've just dug their leaflet out of last years bett bag - their website is no longer working though. The printers were all Nashuatec's
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