Printers

[Disease]

Hi all,

 

What printers are you currently using A4 Mono - A4 Colour - A3 Colour.

 

We have pretty much been exclusively HP using the Pagewide inkjets but with every update HP make it more and more difficult to use remans as well as the current crop failing I think it's time to move away from HP.

 

I welcome your suggestions

[Davit2005]

Not got a complaint against HP LaserJet printers TBH. I jus won't touch an InkJet even at home. I bought a Brother colour LaserJet about 3-4 years back, only used occasionally and still on original toner.

 

When I was a third party field engineer 10+ years back I was sent out to replace fuser units often and the cheaper £100 range HP laser printers were defo in my opinion not designed as field replaceable fusers but apart from that I have not had an issue with HP laserjet at all.

[Disease]

The original Pagewide Pro Inkjets we fantastic, the current crop just seem really poor.

[localzuk]

We get them all under our MFD lease these days. We have a mix of Ricoh IM C300, C4500, C5500 and then a couple of production machines.

[Disease]

We get them all under our MFD lease these days. We have a mix of Ricoh IM C300, C4500, C5500 and then a couple of production machines.

 

 

We have looked at that in the past but the TCO never seems to bear out for us, we have such a great deal on Toner with Silicon Alley's Inkwell Scheme and if I was buy a brand new one every 3 years it still works out cheaper than on the Ricoh contract. We use that contract for the photocopiers but in terms of printers it just doesn't work out.

[localzuk]

We have looked at that in the past but the TCO never seems to bear out for us, we have such a great deal on Toner with Silicon Alley's Inkwell Scheme and if I was buy a brand new one every 3 years it still works out cheaper than on the Ricoh contract. We use that contract for the photocopiers but in terms of printers it just doesn't work out.

Quite surprised by that tbh. What sort of cost per page does that work out at for you?

[Disease]

I don't have the exact figures to hand but most of our in room printers are low volume.

 

Back of a fag packet calcs, Main IT room Pagewide Pro Inkjet:

 

Cost of Machine: £370.00

Warranty: £130.00

Total Cost: £500.00

 

Cost per quarter if replacing in 3 years: £42

 

Inks full set assumed x2 over 3 years: £300.00

 

Total cost

Total pages printed 3 Years: 3,660

Cost per page: £0.08pp

 

 

I think the last Ricoh Onsie we bought for the exams office was £74 a quarter and £0.026pp colour.

 

Saving per page on the Ricoh was £220, extra cost of the rental £384 over the contract - the saving on the per page vs increased rental compared to buying our own = £164 extra cost x 14 printers = £2,269 cost to the school.

 

I think, roughly, although all my calculations could be wrong haha.

[localzuk]

Ah, yeah, if they're low volume then it makes sense not to lease. We "consolidated" our fleet so we don't have any low volume devices any more.

[TechMonkey]

Same as localzuk, we consolidated down to fewer devices with Sharp. We had something silly like 95 devices, down to 22 MFPs, 1 in use pageWide and 2 temporary pageWides. We have a few desktop devices in that 22, you wouldn't want them on your desk though, but they are still A3 capable and have scanning and copying built in.

Our cost is down to £0.0190 for Colour and £0.0019 mono.

[psydii]

The original Pagewide Pro Inkjets we fantastic, the current crop just seem really poor.

We found lockdown did for them. They could survive a summer break without use, but that first lockdown, followed by the summer holidays was just too long and the heads got blocked. Six years of reliable service up to that point.

 

I'm also looking for alternatives, and keep ending up back at managed print as now actually being the only way to provide print services economically.. previously it was always a close run thing... and with pagewides nothing could compete if you didn't need toner based prints.

 

We also have an interesting challenge replacing some HP CP5525's ( 'Enterprise' A3 Colour). I would love to find an equivalent device... but nobody seems to be able to offer anything. The CP5225 is hot garbage - it doesn't have its own drivers and performance through Papercut and from MacOS is awful. The CP5525 on the other hand got driver updates two years ago despite being long discontinued.

[psydii]

Same as localzuk, we consolidated down to fewer devices with Sharp. We had something silly like 95 devices, down to 22 MFPs, 1 in use pageWide and 2 temporary pageWides. We have a few desktop devices in that 22, you wouldn't want them on your desk though, but they are still A3 capable and have scanning and copying built in.

Our cost is down to £0.0190 for Colour and £0.0019 mono.

 

May I ask for what mix of devices you have, and your overall volumes?

[TechMonkey]

We have a mix of BP30C25FK, MX2651FK, MX3061SFK, MX5051FK, MX6051FK and a single MXM1055FK beast.

 

Volumes are ridiculous. From 1st September till yesterday: 2,018,665 total pages; 143,253 jobs. That is across copying and printing.

[Oaktech]

Site 1 - 1x Canon A3 MFD (finisher), 5x Canon A4 MFD

Site 2 - 1x Canon A3 MFD (finisher), 2x Canon A3 MFD, 2x Canon A4 MFD

Site 3 - 1x Canon A3 MFD (finisher), 2x Canon A4 MFD, 2x Canon B&W MFD, 1x HP A4 Printer

 

All leased, all on Uniflow. Canon contracts and finance are a bit of a nightmare but you cannot beat the devices or the service backup.

[psydii]

We have a mix of BP30C25FK, MX2651FK, MX3061SFK, MX5051FK, MX6051FK and a single MXM1055FK beast.

 

Volumes are ridiculous. From 1st September till yesterday: 2,018,665 total pages; 143,253 jobs. That is across copying and printing.

 

Half that number but twice the beasts + 2 Riso , 3.01 million pages. Got to say your per page charge is quite a bit better than ours. How long have you been on that contract / lease?

[psydii]

Hi all,

 

What printers are you currently using A4 Mono - A4 Colour - A3 Colour.

 

A4 Mono / Colour - the now discontinued PageWides (and some M401s) until they fail.

A3 Mono/Colour - some repurposed Sharp MFDs that were underutilised in their initial deployment.

We used to have a few CP5525's but eventually they gave up after 12 years and one too many teachers changing toner.

We've tried a couple of HP M404 for A4 mono, and they are fine but way more expensive to purchase and run than the M401's we used before Pagewide

 

For the bulk of A4 and A3 printing we just use our photocopiers or the Risos.

 

It's a balancing act on costs though. Riso's are way cheap to print colour too, but less competitive at mono, and unless you are printing *volume* through them, the capital/lease costs can outweigh the potential savings c.f. photocopiers/printers. The same is true for more traditional photocopiers but you can usually have more of them than the Risos before the sums start to look bad.

 

But then you've got to consider capability and requirements across the estate - we've got half a dozen or so people who shouldn't have a printer by the logic of the spreadsheets, but functionally they are *way* more productive being able to print a sheet a couple of times a day to their desk rather than having to walk 2 minutes to the photocopiers and back while risking interruptions. If we did full cost recovery on just their device for each print we'd be looking at charging £1 per a4 side! It all gets smoothed out across the estate though.

 

 

As it stands when one considers the entire estate, printing through actual desktop printers be they old laserjets or the newer pagewides, is almost a rounding error compared to the volumes (and thus costs) going through the photocopiers/MFD.

Edited July 11, 2023 by psydii
spag

[Net_Man]

Check out (CCS) Crown Commercial Services and click on the suppliers link under each section for the a list of suppliers and the best pricing

 

https://www.crowncommercial.gov.uk/agreements/RM6174

[PotNoodleTech]

Consolidated from a Mixture of 50 laserjet/deskjet 10+ years ago to 10 Ricoh MFD refreshed every 5 years and never looked back.

 

Saved a fortune, printers are 99.9% uptime, pop a toner in a month and feed with paper - hey presto.

 

Would never go back to the old days of spending all day piddling around with ink carts.

[Oaktech]

Check out (CCS) Crown Commercial Services and click on the suppliers link under each section for the a list of suppliers and the best pricing

 

https://www.crowncommercial.gov.uk/agreements/RM6174

 

It's always worth bargaining with your existing supplier based on this framework.

 

Twice now I've got better-than-framework pricing or terms out of Canon by threatening to move suppliers.

[TechMonkey]

Half that number but twice the beasts + 2 Riso , 3.01 million pages. Got to say your per page charge is quite a bit better than ours. How long have you been on that contract / lease?

 

I want to cull it more, the issue is we have many buildings, not linked, so people get arsey about walking. And this was the first round after removing printers on desks, which everyone seemed to have, so I'm glad to have managed what we did. The deal was first sorted in 2020 and we have added to it in the last 18 months. I think we get a good deal as we joined a collective, but that does have added costs so we don't recoup the full savings. Swings and roundabouts really.

 

I think we have saved around 25k over 2 years and I think that is conservative.

[Oaktech]

It's always worth bargaining with your existing supplier based on this framework.

 

Twice now I've got better-than-framework pricing or terms out of Canon by threatening to move suppliers.

 

Because I got a DM about exactly what I meant by this, I thought I'd be explicit...

 

25% reduction on previously negotiated price per page of single colour pages - we print a surprising number of these due to the school colours - (worth approx £1800 over 3 years)

2% reduction under framework cost on full colour per page (worth approx £2000 over 3 years)

Waiving of lease fee for 2x finisher unit when renewing and retaining existing equipment (worth approx £2400 over 3 years)

Waiving of lease fee for 5 floorstanding bulk drawer units when retaining existing equipment (worth approx £2100 over 3 years)

FOC charge cartridge buffer stock.

 

Might not seem like that much to a secondary school budget, but it's a big deal to a primary budget.

[Net_Man]

We had originally purchased several MFD's and Uniflow from a Canon platinum partner. When our contract expired we found that Canon would not offer us CCS framework or Education pricing due to the platinum partner agreement that canon and the partners have in place between them.

Customers can go from canon direct to a partner but not the other way round, unless you buy completely new kit from Canon direct and even that was not easy because of the previous relationship with the partner.

We were paying 3pence for colour and 0.47pence for black and white so we made over a 50% saving using the CCS framework.

Personally i would never buy from any partner ever again. I will see if i can get away with a discount though.