Printer Solutions - tell me what your school does.

[fooyum]

Dear All

 

Can anyone share any good printing solutions with the following requirements:

 

We are a primary school of 14 classrooms and each classroom is required to have a colour, networked, scanner, printer, copier.

 

We currently use Brother printers but they are on their last legs and I need to replace them and I need the above printer to be cheap to run (I know toner is much cheaper but the head wants colour in every classroom). I've looked into the Ricoh gel printers but the cartridges are expensive to buy.

 

Does anyone have any printer solutions they can share? Any advice on any makes of printers is welcome but the SLT have stipulated that we cannot lease printers for the classrooms.

 

 

 

Many thanks

 

 

Fooyum

[HaleStorm]

We have a contract with Konica Minolta here...don;t know what we pay for it though, all i know is when im out i send an email to a lady called Emma and she sends me the toners/image drums/ waste bottles I need. and in return every 3 months i send her the page count from each printer

[Danp]

We for the most part have Kyocera printers around school, toners are a little more than other brands but we find they last longer. Plus toners and waste bottles are as good as the only consumables. Pcounter installed on main server to manage print usage.

[HaleStorm]

we have Pcounter here too, great for setting rules, generating reports for the finance people to charge departments and such like

[sted]

the only school i support that has class printers/scanner/copier use a mix older brothers that refuse to die and newer canon mx whatever was current that had wifi as the inks are just that ink no heads like hp no best before chips just a plastic tank of ink

[elsiegee40]

We are a primary school of 14 classrooms and each classroom is required to have a colour, networked, scanner, printer, copier.

You have got to be kidding! One colour multi function printer per classroom! In a primary school!

 

What are your Governing Body doing? That's expensive!

 

Forgive the exclamation marks, but as a Governor and a Network Manager I am totally gobsmacked.

 

One or two centralised leased colour copier/printers with print management software will help the budget no end.

[rickypike]

As elsiegee40 says above colour printers in in each classroom are far too expensive. We had a similar problem at our Secondary school when I arrived in September 2009, lots of mono and colour laser printers in class rooms, very expensive to run and maintain. Since then I have removed 80% of these (a few mono still in service for the head/business manager etc) but now use a follow me print solution (Papercut) with a managed service. 5 Multifunction copiers strategically placed with the ability for staff and students to print to a central queue and then collect from whichever copier they like. For the 2 ICT rooms that still wanted a colour laser printer I have just adjusted the prices accordingly, suprisingly students and staff would rather use the managed printers and collect from the copiers, even if it means a short walk, rather than be charged 2 or 3 times the cost for using the classroom printers. This has meant that both the ICT colour laser printers are still on their first set of toners!!

 

We have saved around £10K this year alone with the new system (paper, toners, drums, etc)

Hope that helps, regards Ricky

[sparker]

We have just leased two colour a3 and one colour a4 photocopier/scanner MFP and have two further colour a4 printers all Ricoh/Gestetner/NRG for our 600 ppil primary school. We have papercut but don't use it ( I know , I know but too expensive to install on preferred providers kit)) but are running lock print (despite my scepticism) which after the usual whinging has been accepted by the staff and our piles of misprints have disappeared overnight from next to our printers.

MFPs are cheaper to run than printers and large printers are cheaper than small onesso your proposal is the most expensive way to run your printing and will cause you the most problems.

Buying a copier outright is the cheapest thing but you then have unknown servicing costs. I would definitely look at a follow-me solution if you can afford it or lock print if not but printers in every classroom sounds like a nightmare unless it is completely unavoidable.