Page Impressions
- Article 1 of 2
- Document output management, May 2005
The rapid evolution in printer technology has left even the industry gasping for breath.
Print quality has come a long way in the past two decades. Noisy, expensive and functionally one-dimensional dot-matrix and daisy wheel line printers have been rendered antiques by first laser and then inkjet machines, with prices falling so fast that the ratio of printers per employee has fallen from the tens to low single digits. Now desktop printers are capable of photo quality output and even colour laser printers have become affordable to just about every business.
Even the manufacturers are amazed at the rate of change. “The trend in office printing has been more bang for your bucks, every year getting slightly faster and slightly cheaper. In 1993 our ten page per minute network printer cost over £1,500,” says Tracey Rawling Church, head of marketing for printer and copier manufacturer Kyocera Mita. “Now you can get an 18 page per minute printer for less than £200.”
How have printer vendors been able to provide such high quality at such prices?
The changes that have brought this about have been a mixture of technology and economics. Improved manufacturing processes and economies of scale have made manufacturing of printers and their cartridges easier. R&D has brought to printers new technologies – not just laser and inkjet but PostScript, PCL and other printing languages that have mostly eliminated the need for expensive storage and processing capabilities in printers, and interpolation (a way to artificially increase the resolution of the data sent to printers using image enhancement algorithms). As with most industries, these new technologies first appeared at the high end, before moving down into the low end.
Customer drives have been clear: both consumers and businesses have wanted ever-better quality. Consumers want to produce output that’s as good as that produced in the office or by their local chemist’s photographic service; businesses want high-quality output that is low-cost and rapidly delivered – without recourse to a print shop.
This has led to a focus on print quality at the expense of speed in the domestic market and a focus on speed and other features in the business market.
But the intense competition in the printing industry has been responsible for the price cuts that have made printers with such features so affordable.
“If I’m brutally honest, the hardware is lossmaking,” says Paul Birkett, Xerox UK business solutions manager. “It’s become more and more pronounced as features have been added, and the fall in price has been much more rapid than the fall in price of manufacturing costs. In the last three years, there’s been more than a 50% drop in prices – it doesn’t matter how good the process improvements are, they’re not that good.”
With competition forcing greater and greater downward pressures on hardware pricing, virtually all printer manufacturers have shifted their business model to accept loss-making hardware that locks consumers into highly profitable consumables (particularly toner and ink cartridges). Manufacturers reckon that if a printer lasts five years, consumables can easily cost up to seven times the original cost of the printer.
A combination of this business model, competition and R&D has been responsible for the rapidly growing presence of colour laser printers in offices. “Colour laser printers are no longer a luxury item within the office,” says Robin Edwardes, EMEA managing director of TallyGenicom. “This explosion of installed colour lasers and component standardisation within the industry has allowed suppliers to reduce costs while technology evolution is increasing quality.”
But colour printing represents an increased revenue opportunity for vendors, and they have been putting considerable marketing investment into making colour attractive to business purchasers.
Moreover, the cost of colour consumables has come down and different colours of ink cartridges are now available separately, rather than as all-in-one purchases; colour page printing speeds are now almost as good as mono print rates; and many mid-range printers now come with colour capabilities built in, leaving it up to the purchaser to decide whether to buy colour consumables to enable the capability. Yet, colour consumables are still more expensive than black ones, making them a bigger revenue source than mono.
Despite the big push for colour, most emphasis in development is now on improved print speeds and additional features, rather than the continued improvement in resolution and quality that drove the industry during the 1990s.
“I believe printing technology is good enough,” says Kyocera Mita’s Rawling Church. “I’m not saying it won’t improve: lots of people want technology for technology’s sake and IT purchasers in general do want to have the fastest, best, crispest whatever. But really, for most business purposes, 300dpi (dots per square inch) is ample. Most printers today offer 1200dpi, but even for graphic output 600dpi is more than enough. As soon as someone does 2,400dpi, that will be the new standard, but you’re not going to get radical improvement in the effectiveness of the documents, which is ultimately what it’s all about.”
Xerox’s Birkett agrees that the drive for resolution will have a limit. “The end point will be colour laser printing at 2,400dpi for less than £1,000 – you can see some printers with that on the market already. The major hurdle will be local storage. A job like that could require 512MB of [printer-based] storage and processing.” The push is likely to be from the laser end of the market downwards rather than inkjet upwards, simply because of the nature of the two technologies and the fact that lasers already have the business-friendly features needed. Photo-quality lasers are unlikely, as are hybrid printers, so inkjets will continue to be an occasional purchase for most organisations that need photo quality. Otherwise, the higher volumes, speeds and affordable consumables of laser will keep it at the forefront of businesses printer purchasing concerns.