Buyers' guide: Printers

When your printer is up for renewal, the good news is that prices are falling fast with a 20% drop in 2005 showing just how competition is driving sales.

However, you will be faced with a minefield of information to circumnavigate before you can even think about landing a bargain.

Speed and quality are probably the most important factors, while colour is the fastest growing printer segment driven by a combination of falling prices, faster speeds and demand for inhouse colour printing. Analyst firm IDC predicts that the colour printer market will double by 2009. While colour was once a luxury that few businesses would consider as an affordable office solution, the new breed of printers cost less to run with cheaper consumables such as colour ink cartridges and falling costs per page. Expect to pay around one pence for a black and white page, and six pence for a colour page.

Choosing the right printer for your business is critical – and complicated. Prices range from the deceptively low entry-level price of inkjet printers for as little as £100 (although these are renowned for punitive running costs with low cartridge page yield and high ink replacement costs) to £1,500 for a top of the range laser printer. Laser offers faster print speeds, high-quality black and white, as well as colour printed documents, and competitive laser consumable costs, including the added benefi t of individual colour and black cartridges.

WHAT DO YOU NEED?

It is always worth assessing your current usage by conducting a quick print audit of average pages printed per month, A4 or A3 requirements, and colour usage. Take a long-term view and consider the potential growth of your company. Expect to allocate one printer to every eight to 10 users, with faster products in departments such as marketing and sales that produce lots of presentations and mailings. If you are outsourcing work to copy shops, it is now usually cheaper to bring these jobs in-house, especially for printing stationery and tailored promotional brochures. There is less wastage and no limitations on print runs or penalties for small orders.

While colour is dominating the market, you will not want your staff running off colour documents or images without controls. Make sure that your new printer has good administrator features so you can limit colour usage, either by user or group, or even by document type. These features are available on many models and are designed for use by laymen, as opposed to IT specialists – an important point to consider.

COLOUR AND MONO

Colour is undoubtedly where the future lies and the latest technology such as wireless printing, media card slots and improved paper handling features are being developed for colour models. The printer vendors are obviously keen to push colour as it increases their margins on consumables, but remember that the best business printers do offer mono and colour simultaneously. It is also possible to disable the colour on a printer if you do not need colour now but want to future-proof your purchase.

SPEED VERSUS QUALITY

Laser produces a high-quality fi nished product at the best speeds. Inkjets may look like a cheap alternative but beware the exorbitant consumable prices, as these will eat up your print budget.

Key points on your printer shortlist should be ease of use, total cost of ownership translated into cost per copy and taking into account consumables, print quality and speed. There is nothing more frustrating that setting up a new network printer only to find that users are waiting ages to collect documents.

Falling prices mean that you should be able to pick up a good quality laser printer offering 20 pages per minute for around £500, while a top quality business printer running at up to 35 pages per minute costs around £1,000.

But remember that speed has to be balanced with quality; test out a selection of frequently printed colour documents and look out for clarity and crispness of the text and sharpness of colour. Consistency of colour output is another great measure of a printer as you will not want long print runs fading out midway through a job.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Buying a printer is rather like buying a car – you can go for the base model with no extra features or spend your entire budget on a fully specifi ed model. Likewise with printers, the entry-level models will do the job, but at slower speeds with lower yields per cartridge, leading to higher running costs. Paper tray capacity will be limited and are expensive to buy as extra options. A 550-sheet feeder can cost £350, while a high-capacity 1,100-sheet feeder often tops £500. This can quickly ramp up the cost of your initial investment.

Check out the processor speed as this is vital for converting data into a format suitable for printing. The faster the processor the better the printer will cope with complex print jobs. Some lowend machines use the Windows GDI (graphic driver interface) system, so that the PC does the bulk of the processing. This is a cheap option, and not suitable for offi ce demands.

The bigger the hard drive the faster your printer will be able to handle print jobs, improving productivity. It is also possible to save regularly printed documents on the hard drive, such as expenses forms or location maps, for quick retrieval and printing.

Another must-have for most businesses is network printing, which is often not available on cheaper models and this is something that is essential for any office set-up, however small. Wireless printing is an alternative for smaller offi ce workgroups and this is beginning to appear on laser printers.

A great cost-saving feature to look out for is duplex or doublesided printing that can slash your paper bills considerably, not to mention help the environment. Energy saving features and better power consumption are also features to look out for, as these will help to reduce your electricity bills and are also less damaging to the environment.

HIDDEN COSTS

The capital cost of printers may be relatively inexpensive but the cost of consumables, maintenance and hardware plays an important part in budgetary decisions. Estimates suggest that 40% to 45% of total cost of ownership goes toward hardware servicing and consumables, and 55% to 60% is down to manageability and reliability.

You should expect to spend anything between £300 and £1,500 for a colour laser printer, depending on the size of the workgroup, range of features required and print speeds. When you need replacement cartridges you can save money by buying high capacity toner cartridges – these print nearly twice the number of pages and cost about 20% more than a standard cartridge, a signifi cant upfront saving.

As prices are squeezed and printer prices continue to fall, vendors will rely increasingly on consumables to maintain profi tability on printer sales. To keep costs down, negotiate a bulk price agreement on cartridge replacement costs, buy online or consider one of the new vendor-run packages that offer cost-per-page packages similar to copier contracts, where users pay a fi xed sum per month for the whole package. Xerox PagePack is a good example, offering print consumables (excluding paper), service, hardware and maintenance support.

MAJOR PLAYERS

HP dominates the printer market with nearly half of UK sales and is the favoured brand offering a range of products covering all budget levels and speed requirements. It has a large dealer network and the products are also widely available on the high street and online.

Epson is the number two, accounting for around 13% of the market. Xerox, Dell, Oki, Lexmark, Canon, Kyocera Mita, Konica Minolta, Brother and Samsung all sell business printers, with most of these vendors launching new colour printers in the past 12 months. Dell is one of the relative newcomers to the market but is likely to put pressure on established vendors using its online sales approach, which is sure to offer cost advantages.

WARRANTIES AND MAINTENANCE

The industry-norm is a one-year vendor warranty on printers covering parts and typically engineer response within 24 hours. Most manufacturers and dealers offer extended two, three and four-year warranties offering different levels of support. These have to be bought within 90 days of the original printer purchase. Maintenance can be a real bugbear for printers and remember that you have to use all the original consumables and parts to maintain cover.

The one-year Lexmark Service Pack starts at £76 per printer for on-site repairs, a Xerox two-year extended on-site warranty ranges from £240 to £400 and the HP Care Pack Services warranty next day on-site response costs £292 for a four-year package.

Alternatively, there are independent service companies and prices range from £100 to £250 per model per annum for an eight or four-hour response time. Expect to pay hourly rates of up to £50 per hour and a minimum call-out of £50 to £75 for oneoff repairs. Consider what IT skills you have in-house that could reduce, or increase, the number of call-outs you’ll make.

HOW TO BUY

Dealers and resellers offer a great starting point for a printer purchase as you can review a selection of manufacturers’ products under one roof. Some manufacturers sell direct to businesses but they often focus primarily on enterprise customers. Dell sells the majority of its business online but has started some direct sales to business customers.

If you are looking for bargains, try online computer and peripherals web stores such as Dabs.com and Pricerunner.co.uk, and on the high street multiples such as PC World Business, Comet and Dixons will offer you the opportunity to test the printers first hand.