Looking for Printer suppliers

[Duranis]

We currently lease our printers from Konica Minolta but are potentially looking to change (though I would be happy staying with them).

 

As we have recently become part of an academy it is all being done centrally and their preference is to buy outright and have some service agreement to cover repairs/consumables.

 

What they have sent me to have a look at seems excessive. £500 for a "pre-owned" KM 3100. This is a 6 year old model which is an older model than we already have, and second hand, so is likely physically older then what we already have too.

 

The next option they sent was a Bizhub C3300i for £1250, from a very quick search I found one place selling them for just under £600 and another for £720. The problem is I don't know how legit these companies are. Still seems a lot of money though.

 

I don't know what the cost of the service agreement is but apparently it was pretty high.

 

Would love to hear what everyone else is doing for printers.

[Katy]

For our copier supplies and servicing, we pay roughly the same price for the leased one as we do for the ones we bought - roughly 2p/page colour and 0.02p/page mono (plus VAT). This covers the toner and all servicing and warranty etc (although they were supplied new so that might need taking into account if you are using refurb kit). These are Sharp 60ppm (leased) and Toshiba 75ppm (purchased), these are in the region of £5k a machine though new.

 

With the smaller printers (Xerox VersaLink C405n size) it's a bit more per page, think it's double the cost, but we don't pay anything for the printers (we don't own them, we don't lease them, they are just... there.)

[Duranis]

@Katy That sounds more like what I would expect. Could you tell me which company that is through?

[mikeprice]

slightly off topic

 

But - given the problems getting money out of school to upgrade stuff - I have found that lease contracts are great for stuff like this because the contract only last 1 few years (5??) after which it gets replaced or renewed - normally with a new printer

 

Whereas if you buy it outright then the school has to fork out a load of money for new printers

 

We all know where that can go

 

More on topic (see I can be good!!!)

when I had a similar problem I just Googled printer maintenance for the local area - although I did have to get a lot of quotes in order to get 3 quotes that were worth looking at

(I have mentioned it before - but who putsin a quoite where the columns don't add up - for IT equipment??? - weird)

[Katy]

@Katy That sounds more like what I would expect. Could you tell me which company that is through?

The Sharp stuff is through Midshire (who are now Sharp Business Systems, think they are currently rebranding but not sure as there's still the Midshire name on paperwork etc) who would be nationwide, the Toshiba and Xerox are Sensible Choice who are based up in the north west so won't have any presence or engineers etc down your way (assuming your location on EG is correct i.e. Kent)

[Katy]

slightly off topic

 

But - given the problems getting money out of school to upgrade stuff - I have found that lease contracts are great for stuff like this because the contract only last 1 few years (5??) after which it gets replaced or renewed - normally with a new printer

 

Whereas if you buy it outright then the school has to fork out a load of money for new printers

 

We all know where that can go

 

Yes - lease costs more over the lease term and you have to give the kit away, which is bad if it's in good nick but who has honestly seen photocopiers in a decent state after 5 years of hammering... we preferred to lease as we could then say to finance "if you don't sign a new lease there will be no printing" rather than "Well we can try and bandage up this broken heap I guess". Although finance won on the last contract as it was I think £4k cheaper to buy them than it was to lease for 5 years and give back.

[Edu-IT]

Yes - lease costs more over the lease term and you have to give the kit away, which is bad if it's in good nick but who has honestly seen photocopiers in a decent state after 5 years of hammering... we preferred to lease as we could then say to finance "if you don't sign a new lease there will be no printing" rather than "Well we can try and bandage up this broken heap I guess". Although finance won on the last contract as it was I think £4k cheaper to buy them than it was to lease for 5 years and give back.

We have a leased one and also an owned one where we pay a charge per page for toner and maintenance. Having started looking at replacing the leased one, it would appear that the cost to buy against lease is the same if looking at just 5 years. It only seems to become more cost effective if you intend to keep the machine for longer than 5 years but by then the cost per copy charges on a new leased machine will have probably reduced so it's swings and roundabouts.

[Katy]

We have a leased one and also an owned one where we pay a charge per page for toner and maintenance. Having started looking at replacing the leased one, it would appear that the cost to buy against lease is the same if looking at just 5 years. It only seems to become more cost effective if you intend to keep the machine for longer than 5 years but by then the cost per copy charges on a new leased machine will have probably reduced so it's swings and roundabouts.

Our last 5 year one was a few thousand cheaper to buy vs 5 year lease, basically because there was no finance charge and the supplier offered the same price for purchase vs what they would invoice the finance company if it was leased, but yeah depends on your supplier. Not sure which method I prefer really - leasing does have the advantage of it going back when it's worn out and you can't be made to just sweat the asset when it's really just jamming daily with parts no longer available (was I glad to see the back of our last leased lot! Different supplier than we currently use...)

[Duranis]

Thanks for the feedback.

 

Yeah I personally would prefer to lease just so there is a good reason to replace the thing once it has been hammered for 3 to 5 years and is on its last legs. Looks like my input isn't required now though so will see what we end up with.

[mikeprice]

One school I worked in had 2 photocopiers

 

1 was on lease and was fixed whenever it broke as per the lease terms - fine

 

The other had been bought - I think Moses had finished with it

 

but was on a separate contract with the same company - which kept going up in price due to difficulty in getting spares and getting it to work

In fact the back to back facility was useless - and it couldn't cope with more than about 10 copies at a time

and if it jammed it took me (yup - my job - clearly - IT Teacher and sole IT Tech left me loads of free time) ages to unjam

But there was no money available to replace it

I was only there 2 years - when I left there was still no money available to replace it

[Jcx500]

We Use Midshire (Part of Sharp)

[TLARWise]

We are just moving over to using Laserlife (https://www.laserlife.co.uk/cap-ex-free/) for our smaller A4 printers where you purchase toner from then and they supply the printer and ongoing maintenance for free. For larger A3 MFD's we are using Midshire/Sharp.

[bald_pig]

We are just moving over to using Laserlife (https://www.laserlife.co.uk/cap-ex-free/) for our smaller A4 printers where you purchase toner from then and they supply the printer and ongoing maintenance for free. For larger A3 MFD's we are using Midshire/Sharp.

 

We've just left laserlife, they were ancient Kyocera printers, and a set of toners from them happened to cost about the same as a printer...