Color Copying & Printing Can Be Expensive (Unless....)

This months featured Guest Blogger for the P4P Hotel is David Murphy from Riso.

About a week ago, David and I had the chance to speak for about an hour on some of the everyday costs associated with color copying and printing.

Color Copying Can Be Expensive (Unless…)

About 14 months ago, Citigroup issued a memo to its employees announcing a new corporate cost-cutting policy. The memo stated that “the use of color copying and printing dramatically increases our copying and printing costs. Color presentations are unnecessary for internal purposes; therefore going forward color copying and printing should only be used for client presentations.”

To help reduce these unnecessary costs, the memo also stated that color photocopiers would be removed altogether from some Citigroup office locations. Somehow this internal memo got in the hands of the press. The story was picked up by CNN and others, making for interesting discussions about how far a big company would go to cut its costs.

Looking back on this story (which you can view here), one of its interesting aspects is that it occurred before the national financial meltdown and before most executives really started worrying seriously about cost cutting in a fight for the survival of their enterprise. As the economy begins to emerge from its current crisis, some managers will start to think about investing for the growth of their organizations. What will the fate of color copiers be? Will the color-printed page be considered an “unnecessary” expense?

For many, perhaps the answer is yes, especially considering that the market price for toner-based color MFPs ranges from about five to eight cents per color copy. When a black & white page can be printed for well under one cent per page, how can an organization justify such an exponential increase in costs just to add color? Since the market price of color copying isn’t likely to fall much further anytime soon (mostly for technological reasons), the best chance for organizations to justify printing in color would be some new technological breakthrough to be introduced.

Technological breakthroughs in printing don’t happen very often, but one happened this summer when RISO introduced its new family of ComColor high-speed inkjet printers. With color costs per page as little as one cent and with an average CPC of about two and a half cents, this unique product launch has already begun to disrupt the MFP market. What’s more is that RISO’s ComColor also has a very aggressive cost for monochrome output, which can be less than a half cent per page.

What these low operating costs mean is that an organization would pay about the same low cost for black on ComColor as it would ordinarily pay for output on a high-speed monochrome MFP. It also means that color output could be produced for about half the cost of color-enabled high-speed MFPs. Further, ComColor’s color costs are comparable with the monochrome costs of many other devices like laser printers and workgroup MFPs.

Because ComColor uses an inkjet technology, its color output doesn’t have the same appearance of that produced on a color laser printer or other toner-based color MFP. ComColor also doesn’t print on glossy paper. But in an office environment, how “necessary” (as Citigroup might ask) is it for users to print everyday documents in vibrant graphic-quality color on glossy paper? In a 2009 InfoTrends survey, enterprise workers stated that their most frequently printed office applications are word processing documents, emails, spreadsheets, presentations, and web articles. Certainly, the majority of these types of documents shouldn’t typically require laser-quality output. If they can be printed attractively and effectively in black for less than a cent per page and in color for only a small amount more, then it is difficult to understand why anyone would want to pay “unnecessary” incremental costs.

Sure, there are some features that electrophotographic (toner-based) MFPs have that ComColor lacks. Yet, there is no comparison when it comes to productivity and reliability in higher volumes. ComColor’s print speeds of 90 to 150 pages per minute, whether in black or color, with static or variable images, on regular paper or card stock, or in simplex or duplex modes. There is no reduction in speed. In terms of reliability, ComColor’s heatless inkjet imaging process and its simple, but advanced paper-handling system make this device a true office workhorse.

The bottom line is that color printing can be expensive…unless you select a device that is specifically engineered to produce attractive color pages at the lowest possible cost and at the highest possible speed and reliability. There are many other features and benefits of this new breakthrough technology. If you’re interested, you can learn more at http://www.newinkjet.com/. If Citigroup knew what ComColor could do for its communications costs, its executives would perhaps still be rolling out their color MFPs. The only difference is that they might be rolling in new ComColor high-speed inkjet printers to replace some of them.

David Murphy
RISO, Inc.

Note from Art: Where are the vertical markets for the ComColor? I have one, and it's a killer app for this system. Guaranteed to capture 200-400K per month and even higher numbers. I'll be blogging about this in the next few days. KILLER APPS for the ComCOLOR!

-=Good Selling=-