Print Costs per Page

[TechSupp]

Can anyone give me an idea what print costs per page the following printers would be. Trying to put a more realistic message across over the useage of the printers at school. Just telling them how many prints they have done is not having an impact. Hope telling them in money terns would have more of an impact. Printers we use are HP2500n (colour laser), HP1015 (mono laser) and a Xerox 6180DN (colour laser).

[Pete10141748]

NOTE: Edited due to bad math's ability as pointed out by nickjones further down the thread!

 

HP1015;

 

Retail price (public price that is) seems to be circa £50, and it reckons it'll do about 2200 printouts.

 

£50 / 2200 prints = 2p per page (obv. cheaper if you get the toner cheaper)

 

 

HP 2500;

 

circa £200 to replace all 4 toners, around 2500 pages printed.

 

£200 / 2500 pages = 8p per page (again, cheaper if you get the toner cheaper)

 

 

For what it's worth, I doubt telling staff the costs per page of the printer will have much effect either. In my experience, the costs of printing don't come into staff members' head's at all, they just hit "print" and get thier work; end of.

 

 

Don't know anything about the Xerox, sorry.

 

Pete

Edited February 7, 2008 by Pete10141748

[enjay]

£200 / 2500 pages = 0.08p per page (obv. cheaper if you get the toner cheaper)

 

Check your maths, Pete - £200 / 2500 pages = £0.08, not 0.08p; so that's 8 pence per page.

 

When I worked this out for our HP3600, it came in at around 7p a page, IIRC.

 

Do you keep a record anywhere of how often you replace toners and roughly how much paper goes through them? The manufacturer's estimates of 2500 pages per toner are based on a 5% coverage (i.e. only 5% of the page actually has any ink on it), although in my experience here our page coverage is higher than that, meaning that a "2500 sheet" toner actually only does around 1500 pages.

 

Don't forget your paper costs too when calculating price-per-page, and if you're going for genuine TCO figures, the purchase price of the printer too.

[TechSupp]

Thanks for those figures so far. I had been working on a cosyt of 2p for the mono and 15p for the colour. Not bothered about TCO just the cost of toners as this half term has been terrible for usage. We use the PaperCut software to monitor whats printed by whom and then use the data it produces in a spreadsheet with a lookup table to make sense of it. So I know how many prints they do but need to put a price to it for impact.

[laserblazer]

There's a report that can be printed on the 2600N that shows number of prints. Whenever I change toner, I print this out and write the number of copies next to the colour. That seems to provide an accurate guide.

 

I just had a play with reports and there's one called Supplies Status. It gives the estimated pages remaining, pages printed, date installed and date last used for each colour.

Edited February 7, 2008 by laserblazer
Addendum

[sahmeepee]

With the 2500 and 2550 (and possibly others) you also need to take into account the cost of replacing the drum. On the 2550 IIRC it's around £80 and does a realistic 8,000 pages of mixed mono and colour pages (the quoted value of 20,000 doesn't account for colour pages taking 4 "hits" off the life of the drum).

 

I find the values HP quote on toner life are usually within a hundred sheets or so of the correct value.

 

So that's an extra penny on each sheet. Our paper is about £1.60/ream so that's 1/3 of a penny on each sheet regardless of the printer.

[enjay]

How about power consumption? Our colour lasers idle at around 115W and get up to nearly 1000W when in full swing. That must add up to quite something over the full lifespan of the printer...

[Pete10141748]

Check your maths, Pete - £200 / 2500 pages = £0.08, not 0.08p; so that's 8 pence per page

 

Whoops! That'l teach me to rush a job

 

Hmm, perhaps I'll take back what I said about them being vey cheap printers as well then!

 

Pete

[dave.81]

We currently charge 5p per sheet to departments, although i think this might increase to 10p as they still dont get the message that the photocopier is cheaper.

[elsiegee40]

We started charging real cost at Christmas and tightened up the restrictions on document naming at the same time ('Full size', 'Document' and 'http' are banned in job titles!).

 

It has had a dramatic effect. Our printing fror Jan 2008 is 50% of what was printed in Jan 2007 and 15% of what was printed in September 2007!!

 

We increased print allowances to scale with increased cost per page, so users could have continued to print in the volume they were before.

 

We are now charging

OKI Colour Laser @ 34.5p (Bursar said the .5p sounded like we'd put more effort into calculating it!)

OKI Mono Laser @ 10p

 

The mono's a bit high, but we had a point to make about using the photocopier. We don't collect this money or cross-charge it; it's simply there to control printing.

Edited February 7, 2008 by elsiegee40

[Heebeejeebee]

We currently charge 5p per sheet to departments, although i think this might increase to 10p as they still dont get the message that the photocopier is cheaper.

 

Ever since the finance department upped the price of photo copies all the staff have started printing out their 200 page documents/letters home/profiles etc on the laser printers (because we don't charge them - YET!). My budget has taken a great big hit this year.

 

It'll all end in tears I can promise you that.

 

HBJV