Low cost, high quality printing - not just for enterprises
by Nathan Forrest Hi! We hope that you enjoyed our recent seven-part series on improving your PC's performance. We are now bringing you articles on other topics that we feel could help you in the day-to-day use of your home or small business PC. The articles are written by myself, Nathan Forrest of Future Systems (Sussex). I've been helping out as a moderator on the free computer support forums at www.d-a-l.com since they first opened and I have 15 years' experience of residential and small business IT.
Low cost, high quality printing - not just for enterprises In last week's article, we looked at a revolutionary new method of data backups (http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/150.html) that has driven down the costs of backing up your data and also made it much easier - there's no longer any excuse for a home user or small business to be caught out with a system crash that means that they lose everything. This week's article is about another new product that also uses new technology to drive down costs and could also dramatically improve your experience of its particular area of computing. In fact, I only found out how great this product was on Monday and I couldn't wait to spread the word! Whilst chatting to one of my small business customers last week (a PR / advertising agency of 4 people in one office), it came up in conversation how all of the users do their printing through a single inkjet printer shared off of a desktop PC - just like most homes - and that they were spending around £80 ($160 USD) on ink cartridge replacements. HOW MUCH?! I couldn't believe my ears. I quickly suggested that we should look at the value of replacing the inkjet printer with a decent colour laser printer. For medium- to high-volume printing, laser printers normally work out cheaper to run and can give other benefits as well. Since the cost of colour laser printers has come down so much over the past year or two, they are now much more affordable for small businesses and are even within the reach of many home users. Unfortunately, I knew that their relatively small budget would mean that I'd still have my work cut out.  In my office, we print through a networked Hewlett Packard (HP) Colour LaserJet 3600DN. I love it - for general use, the colour quality is as good as I ever need, print speeds are fast, it's still on its original ink toner cartridges (after a year of use!) and it's much more flexible and useful than a typical inkjet printer. However, the current retail price of around £600 ($1200 USD) put it over budget. So I got in touch with my printer supplier and asked what he could recommend. After a little research, he came back to me with a recommendation of a Xerox Phaser 8560ADN. I was a little sceptical at first as I knew that Xerox printers have always been very popular in large enterprises but that Xerox was very much a premium brand. Initially, I wasn't convinced that a Xerox within my customer's budget would have the features and print quality that I was looking for. Indeed, it was still over budget at just over £500 plus VAT ($1000 USD plus sales tax). However, my printer supplier explained that this printer would be significantly cheaper to run than a conventional printer. Xerox have patented a completely new kind of ink technology. Whereas inkjet printers use plastic cartridges full of liquid ink and laser printers use a cartridge of toner in powder form, Xerox have developed solid ink - literally a small solid cube that you can pick up with your fingers with no mess at all. This new form of ink also means that there's less waste. It's cheaper to buy too. So I did a few calculations and found that the savings on the ink replacements would mean that this high-quality, high-specification printer would actually pay for itself in 12 months! That's impressive. A quick check confirmed that it had all of the features that make a really compelling argument to ditch an inkjet printer and upgrade to something better: - Faster printing
With print speeds of up to 30 pages per minute, this is a seriously quick machine, particularly for large documents. Note that some high-end inkjet printers can print this quickly but printing speeds are almost always quoted for low-quality "draft" printing. In reality, most users run their inkjet printers on medium-quality "normal" printing, which is much slower. There are different quality settings used for laser printers too but lower settings are generally for saving ink rather than increasing speed. Realistically, most users would get 25-30 pages per minute (ppm) from this printer but, on average, only 5-6ppm from a typical inkjet printer. If your inkjet printer is very old, expect more like 2-3ppm!
- Photo quality
One of the reasons that most homes do not have a laser printer is that they give excellent quality black text printing but they have not been up to the standards of inkjet printers for intense colour prints such as photos. Xerox seem to have completely redressed the balance. Their new solid ink technology gives a very bright, vivid, semi-glossy colour finish, even on cheap 80gsm standard "copier" paper. Spending another couple of pounds per pack for decent 90gsm paper would really show it off to its full potential. Even on standard paper though, I was stunned at how good the colour reproduction was. In fact, this printer is becoming very popular in professional printing / reprographics businesses.
 - Low running costs / longer life ink
As I explained earlier, the reduced cost of ink replacements means that this is an economical printer to run. Sure, the solid ink packs cost more than inkjet ink cartridges but they last much much longer. In comparison to other laser printers, they last around the same amount of time (maybe a little longer) but cost notably less.
- Larger print jobs don't slow your PC down
When you have a PC connected to your printer and you send a large print job to it, e.g. 5 or more pages of text, perhaps interspersed with a few images, your PC sends as much of the information as possible to the printer until the printer's memory fills up. Then your PC has to wait until the printer has started printing and cleared some of the memory before the PC can send it a little more data. This queuing (or "print spooling") process continues until the printer has printed enough of your document that it can hold the remaining information in its own memory. In the meantime, you see the little printer icon "hanging" at the bottom of your screen, or you have to wait for the hourglass ("egg timer") to disappear or you can continue working but your PC is slower until the printing finishes.
Having a printer with a larger memory capacity means that it can accept much more data and doesn't need to queue it on the PC so much. A few years back, low-cost laser printers were being sold with 4-8MB of memory, which was a lot better than inkjet printers. These days, you can expect 64MB or even 128MB on a low- to medium-priced laser printer. The Xerox comes with 256MB of memory, meaning it can handle massive print jobs easily and efficiently.
- Network connectivity
On the subject of performance, having a printer that can plug directly into your network is a much more efficient way of printing, even for home users. If you have a laptop connecting wirelessly through your home network, for instance, the chances are that you have an inkjet printer that is plugged into the back of a desktop PC and that's how you print. In this case, you slow down both the laptop AND the PC when you print something from the laptop! This is because the laptop queues information to send to the PC and the PC then queues it to send to the printer.
Connect a printer using a standard Ethernet cable into your network switch or router and each machine on the network can send data directly to the printer without affecting anything else. It also means that the printer is available for printing all of the time that is switched on, eradicating the need to keep a desktop PC switched on in case anyone else wants to use its printer.
- Double-sided (duplex) printing
Most people (myself included) don't really appreciate how good duplex printing is until they've used it regularly themselves. Since getting my duplex-enabled laser printer, I've seen the light! I now print ALL of my internal-use or draft documents on both sides of the paper, which gives me 3 benefits:
- My office is now less of a mess as I only have half as much paper lying around on my desk or in filing trays;
- I feel like I'm doing my bit for the environment: only half as many trees lose their lives to satisfy my paper requirement;
- I've cut 50% off of my paper costs. With those savings, I can easily justify buying much nicer semi-glossy 90gsm paper and I still have money left over.
- 525-sheet input tray
This benefit sounds a little geeky! The Xerox has an impressive 525-sheet paper input tray, which compares well against most low-cost laser printers, which usually hold 250 sheets and even better against inkjet printers, which can usually store only 100-150 sheets. This is more important for small business users than home users but, even so, is another example of how you can spend less time maintaining the Xerox (filling it up with ink and paper that has run out) and more time enjoying printing through it. It also means that you're less likely to send a large document to print and then walk up to the printer to collect it a while later only to find that it got to page 3 and ran out of paper!
- On-site warranty
There's no need to panic if the Xerox stops working in the first year. You won't have to find a way of packing up the 28Kg machine and sending it back because Xerox will assist you over the phone and, if it can't be fixed remotely, will send an engineer out to you to fix it on-site.
If you are in the UK and would like more advice on this printer or other alternatives that might be more suitable for you, please feel free to get in touch.
Nathan Forrest - Future Systems ( Sussex )
http://www.futuresystems-sussex.co.uk
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