SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » Interesting Color Printing Report

September 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Interesting Color Printing Report

TAGS: SMB Hardware

One of the editors (hi, Ted) forwarded this market study spotlight report from Current Analysis to me today on the impact of 'disposable' color printers to the printer industry. Nothing super-new on the surface: color inkjets have become so cheap that they cost less than a business lunch and color lasers have dropped down far enough that many of them might be considered home printers.

That's created a problem for the printing industry, apparently, combining an increase in disposables as well as a decrease in demand for a chunk of their product lines. My vote: Buy a color laser and go with it.

But near the end of the report, they bring up a new thing: SMB Pay-per-Print programs. It's lilke an all-in-one car lease. You get the printer(s), all the consumables and all maintenance from the manufacturer for a set monthly fee based on the manufacturer's assessment of your printing volume.

Xerox apparently already has a program like this called Xerox PagePack (offered as a service option when you purchase specific Xerox hardware) as well as a metered supplies program, and the folks at Oki are expected to do the same thing in the next month or two. Europe's apparently had them for a while from both of the above as well as Epson.

Advantage to the SMB? You know what your printing costs are up front. No muss, no budgeting fuss. I'm still thinking about this one. Sounds good, but I'd think it's most useful to outfits that really do a lot of printing. Your general office print volume deal might still be served more simply just purchasing X color lasers per X employees and being done with it.

If anyone has had experience with PagePack, post your experiences here and we can talk about it some more.

Posted by Oliver Rist on September 26, 2006 10:12 AM

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