Colour printing: why the bill keeps outstripping the budget

Overview

The way in which lease contracts are designed encourages organisations to agree on a printing price model for a number of years - typically three to five - and then forget about it.

But does this tell the whole story? Nearly half of companies - 44 percent - do not know how much they pay for colour printing. The same proportion say they would be very interested in reducing the cost of colour printing if they could.

This paper argues that the printing model which many organisations have adopted - large, highly specified departmental laser printer/copiers shared among many users - results in unnecessary expense and environmental damage.

Furthermore, the study shows, users are often frustrated by the slow performance and frequent break-downs that can plague large shared printing resources.

This paper advocates a printing model based on the needs of the majority of users, rather than the sharing of scaled-up resources based on the requirements of a handful of power users.