Papercut cost per page

[kevbaz]

Hi all

 

Just wondering what people have set thier print costs at in papercut and how they came to the numbers they have?

 

also does anyone do more with it such as publish the enviromental impact ? email weekly reports that sort of thing?

[Soulfish]

Staff are 2.5p/mono sheet, 15p/colour sheet. Set at that rate due to cost for photocopying (we use papercut MF so integrate it with our copiers as well) including the paper, and to discourage colour printing. Students are likely to be charged 4-5p/sheet mono and 25p/sheet colour, but we're still working on that

[dgsmith]

We're quite generous in that we don't charge stupid amounts for colour. I work on a system of price paid for cartridge / stated toner yield + 1p (mono) or +3p (colour).

 

For instance, on our HP 2600n cartridges I get compatible cartridges for £21 each and the yield is 2000 pages. This works out at 1p + 3p = 4p. As you can't tell how much colour coverage there is you have to go somewhere in the middle. Papercut can recognise between mono/colour pages with PCL drivers and we use a greyscale discount so that black-only printing is charged at mono values on colour printers.

 

It's quite hard to get it exactly right though. Some printers will still use colour to print mono, though as the print allowance we give students is 30p per week (£5 initially in Sept), and our print credit system is more of a deterrent against waste than to actually charge (which we will still do), it seems to work for us by not charging the earth. Abusers of the system can be identified usually quite easily and this is dealt with separately.

 

We don't make a point of showing environmental impact, as we know noone will be interested. We check weekly reports and keep an eye on who is printing the most but again we don't make a point of emailing usage reports. We do, however, print a report every half-term showing departmental usage and costs, which is deducted from department parts. This is much more effective than anything else as it hurts them financially.

[CyberNerd]

I presented the following to management. Feel free to dispute my calcs. It won an argument in any case:

 

The College has a variety of printers and uses a number of different cartridge manufacturers. Some cheaper cartriges that we use cannot be guaranteed to print the number of pages detailed below. Costs do not include power consumption, replaced cartridges due to damage and technician time. Although the costs are 1.5p, 1.8p and 3.3p for different classes of printer - we believe the average cost is around 2.2p per page.

 

[edit]

prices below include cost of Paper

Per box £9.45

Per Ream £1.89

Per Sheet £0.00378 [/edit]

 

Good Quality HP Printer, similar to staffroom (P4015n)

 

Cost of printer £738

Maintenance kit £275.5

Maintenance kit over lifetime of printer (X2) £551

Cost of printer over lifetime £1289

Expected lifetime (pages) 700000

Toner Cost (genuine High yield) £198.1

number of copies per toner 25000

number of toners over lifetime 28

Cost of toners over lifetime of printer £5546.8

Total Cost over printer lifetime £9481.8

cost per page £0.013545428571429

 

 

Average midrange printer, Similar to ITSuite (3015), Science, Library

 

Cost of printer £311

Maintenance kit £218

Maintenance kit over lifetime of printer (X2) None. Cheaper to bin printer. Rollers = £30

Cost of printer over lifetime £341

Expected lifetime (pages) 250000

Toner Cost (genuine High yield) £144.15

number of copies per toner 12500

number of toners over lifetime 20

Cost of toners over lifetime of printer £2883

Total Cost over printer lifetime £4169

cost per page £0.016676

 

Cheap Laser Printer, Small Office (P1606dn)

 

Cost of printer £109

Maintenance kit N/A

Maintenance kit over lifetime of printer (X2) None. Cheaper to bin printer

Cost of printer over lifetime £109

Expected lifetime (pages) 24000

Toner Cost (genuine High yield) £49.38

number of copies per toner 2100

number of toners over lifetime 11.4285714285714

Cost of toners over lifetime of printer £564.342857142857

Total Cost over printer lifetime £764.062857142857

cost per page £0.031835952380952

Edited February 8, 2011 by CyberNerd
inc paper cost

[timzim]

I found the actual yield per cartridge varied wildly from that estimated by the supplier so I sat down one day (actually took a lot longer than one day!) with a calculator and worked out a rough price per page the hard way - reset page count, put in new cartridge, check page count when cartridge runs out. The colour printers were harder as they use some colours faster than others (on average though 2x B&W for 1x each other colour). We use refilled toner cartidges.

 

Ignoring maintenace costs my average price per page worked out to be 5p B&W, 10p colour. In PaperCut you can also choose to charge different amounts for different paper size/grayscale/etc - see under Advanced Charging tab.

[bossman]

HP printers costs per page are usually based on 5% coverage as per the yield, below is the standard ISO for determining these factors:

 

ISO/IEC 19798:2007 - Method for the determination of toner cartridge yield for colour printers and multi-function devices that contain printer components

 

This is what a page with 5% coverage looks like:

What 5 Percent Coverage Page Looks Like

 

So you can imagine what a page with colour from a picture embedded into a word document full of text will consume (approx 75%) and your figures come out rather differently.

 

Cut the printing! Cut the costs!

 

VLE with digital portfolio so no printing necessary.

 

(Must tell teaching staff this) although they are on printer credits.

[Soulfish]

HP printers costs per page are usually based on 5% coverage as per the yield, below is the standard ISO for determining these factors:

 

ISO/IEC 19798:2007 - Method for the determination of toner cartridge yield for colour printers and multi-function devices that contain printer components

 

This is what a page with 5% coverage looks like:

What 5 Percent Coverage Page Looks Like

 

So you can imagine what a page with colour from a picture embedded into a word document full of text will consume (approx 75%) and your figures come out rather differently.

 

Cut the printing! Cut the costs!

 

VLE with digital portfolio so no printing necessary.

 

(Must tell teaching staff this) although they are on printer credits.

 

+1. The 5% calculations for print toner life span we found useless. I did have a great spreadsheet from Konica that had % coverage for CMYK for 4 different types of document that you could use to calculate actual costs per page. Based on that (and before we moved to a managed print contract and started using papercut) our mono print costs could be up to 10p/page and colour in excess of 60p/page!

 

I'll see if I can dig out the spreadsheet and values that Konica suggested as accurate % coverage levels.

[CyberNerd]

Don't pay too much attention to the 5% coverage, it will depend upon things like printing density etc. The final cost by this method arbitrary - as long as you use the same method for each printer. We worked out the 'cost' to be 0.013p for a good printer - but we still charge 2.8p. I believe the real cost (for us) is around 2.2p based upon last years historic data for the whole school, using lots of different printer types. The calculation I used above was mostly to convince the head we should buy fewer but better quality printers, as we could quite easily prove that they were more cost effective to run.