Colour printer vs Photocopier

[SteveB_NI]

Following a meeting last week, the topic of colour laser printer usage costs came up - and a suggestion was made to shift users from printing to colour laser printer to colour photocopier.

 

Apparently this will cut costs by a great deal.

 

What do you use? Colour laser or Colour photocopier? The plan would be to network the colour photocopier, and teachers (and selected students) can send jobs to it, similar to the current set up with the HP 4600's.

 

Collating scary figures at the moment....

[limbo]

Are you talking about leasing the photocopier rather than buying it outright?

[OutToLunch]

I take the more pragmatic approach of : I don't have to fix the photocopiers or have anything to do with the cost of toners for them, ergo, they're much better than seeing the colour laser printers being hammered and me fixing them every day!

[Finch7]

Well if the school has a colour photocopier any way then why not. We do that here and have a hplj 4650. I dread to think how oftern the toner in the printer would need replacing without the photocopier.

 

As photocopying is charged to departments and toner comes out of a different budget I'm happy

[SteveB_NI]

Yes, leasing them for a short time initially to see the benefits if any.

 

We can phone the supplier for toner at any time too, which would be of benefit during periods of heavy use. (read: all the time!)

 

You're lucky not having to touch photocopiers, I get asked to photocopy work for staff members, and fix paper jams etc even though I am an ICT Technician (by job title at least).

[bishopsgarthstockton]

We use colour laser printers here 1 A3 and the rest A4. although its a bugga when one needs repairing, as it often means spending the same amount of money repairing as to replacing... If that makes sence

[strawberry]

we lease our machines as part of a service contract and that works very well. we use reflex, although i'm sure other good suppliers exist.

[bossman]

I have been badgering SLT for 3 years to go with everybody printing to reprographics with a focus on the rack it, stack it and pack it theme.

 

Everyone has access via pin number allocated to their subject, they can set it up via their own log in to do whatever they want and can even gain access to it remotely. Costs so far for 5% coverage colour is about 5pence per sheet. At the moment the admin do reprographcs (mono) and costs are not bad but for colour they print from HP 4600n at cost of 12pence per 5% coverage per sheet.

[john]

I push the colour copier all the way, its cheaper to run than the 4600's and when it breaks I spend 5 minutes looking at it then pick the phone up, much better way of working.

[localzuk]

We use the colour copier way of doing things for the majority of stuff. We have a couple of colour lasers (Epson multifunction things) in the library and front reception as it makes life easier to do it that way.

 

The problem with centralised printing is that if it goes down, you are stuck. When our photocopier breaks all hell breaks loose.

[Guest kerrymoralee9280]

We only have 2 colour lasers in school. One in Art and the other in the main office.

If any other colour printing needs to be done they use the colour copier. It's a Toshiba and has a handy feature - When staff press print they have to enter there given department code. This way all the bills are totted up ready with no extra hassle for the reprographics girl.

[john]

Thats what I love, but I don't allow the popup on screen, they go into an Invalid Queue on the copier and then they release them directly on the machine, means that students dont need to see the code.

[ATOM]

Hi

 

We lease a canon 3170c which is networked - costs about 6.8p a copy for colour. Having a look now at 4600 use and see how it compares. All staff use the pin system and the printer driver also includes user management so you can set different print and copy settings as well - has helped to keep both photocopying and printing use down. Only drawback is that the ccanon is more prone to ( like all copiers) and only knocks out 6ppm - the 4600 is much faster both ppm and first page out. Will be interesting to see how it compares in the long run.

[localzuk]

ATOM - we have a canon 5800i which does 15ppm colour, the only issue we have with it is that it exhibits all the symptoms of an old colour copier. Streaking, lack of colour uniformity etc... This is likely down to a misconfiguration by the service technicians but it is still annoying all the same.

[ATOM]

We are only a smallish primary so anything bigger would be a bit prohibative- quality is good though - we have access to run the calibration set up - presume yours would have the same?

[SteveB_NI]

Idea has became a non-runner.

 

We're going to get a series of new photocopiers etc for the new school build, but for the meanwhile it's cheaper to continue using our current printers.

 

Now time to put an order in for toner.

[MkII]

We're just going for such a scheme - and I've now got to configure this new Canon photocopier to do the job - shame it wasn't specced up for it, but we hope it will just work!

 

I'll be playing with it over the next few days hopefully

[srochford]

One of the advantages of using the photocopier is that lease deals are typically charged per page - it doesn't matter if it's a single full stop or solid colour, you pay the same amount. This makes budgeting far easier - no trying to decide if you're doing 5%, 50% or whatever colour.

 

Some of the charging schemes charge per toner per page (ie if you only use black and yellow you pay less than full CMYK) but you always know the maximum you'll pay.