Brighter Times for Network Color Printing

"What's amazing about printers today, especially in the color market, is how good they are and their speed," says Matt Groka, senior director of purchasing at CDW, Vernon Hills, Ill.

That excellent quality is now increasingly teamed with an affordable price tag. With 49 percent of solution providers surveyed for VARBusiness' 2002 State of Technology (SOT) saying they are focusing their deployment efforts on printing technologies, that's welcome news.

Clearly, vendors have poured a lot of time,and

probably even more money,into making their products best-in-class, while at the same time keeping prices affordable.

"One of the biggest things I can see about printers is price," says Dale Powell, president of Business Solutions 2000, Mt. Pleasant, S.C., and a Xerox solution provider. "A couple of years ago, business printers were $10,000," he says. Not true today: In fact, the three printers in the chart on page 84 are all less than $2,200. "It's amazing to me that the speed went up, the quality went up, and the price continues to go down," Powell says.

"I think what's going to happen is printing will become less expensive and faster," Groka adds. "But we've hit a point where, well, how much better can the picture be?"

Still, not all manufacturers can say they are at the top of their game in terms of picture quality. And innovation is also important to VARs: For example, according to VARBusiness' 2002 Annual Report Card data for the network color printers, solution providers surveyed rewarded top-ranked Xerox with the highest category marks for quality and innovation, while last-place Minolta received the lowest marks in that criteria.

Overall, vendors have focused on improvements in speed, color quality and ease of use. It's how vendors fine-tune those points that will put some printers ahead of others.

Improving Speed

One method of improving speed is to reduce the number of times a piece of paper goes through the printer. In single-pass technology, all of the color is applied to the printer drum at once, allowing the paper to move through faster. Four-pass technology applies colors to the drum separately, running the paper through numerous times before the entire job is finished.

Printers using single-pass technology can easily leave printers using four-pass technology in the dust; the object is for more color printers to take advantage of the former technology. Take Hewlett-Packard's 2500tn: It can push out 16 pages per minute (ppm) in black and white, but only four ppm in color.

"In some models, the paper can only go so fast, as it has to move past each drum," says Jeffrey Silden, president of Silden Software, Woodland Hills, Calif., and a Lexmark solution provider "In Lexmark's C750, there are four separate sections on a drum, so now it can spin faster and print the image better," he says.

"I think it's good that vendors are heading in the direction of single-pass," adds Groka, who provides Hewlett-Packard solutions through CDW. "But I have a feeling it's something that increases the cost, so not many vendors are rushing into it. "

Increased hard-drive memory and new processors have also influenced printer speed. Most printers now come standard with 64 MB, expandable to 256 MB or 512 MB.

"Xerox has increased the hard drive and processors inside to speed up the first page out," Powell says. "They've put in huge processors that you would find in PCs."

Those processors make everyday jobs in black-and-white faster, and color prints nearly four times faster than the average two, three or four ppm of yesterday.

Color Quality

A vast majority of printers use toner cartridges, one with each color of cyan, yellow, magenta and black. But some, including the Xerox Phaser 8200DP, use solid ink. A solid-ink block for each of the four colors is placed in the machine, heated and liquified. Although the technology is far from new, improvements during the past 10 years have improved print quality. (See "Color Printers Up Close," page 82).

"It's very vibrant," Powell says. "It almost leaps off the page, giving photos a wet look. It's fantastic."

But is solid-ink technology good for all your customers? Not necessarily. In some cases, solid ink is undesirable because of the wax-like finish it leaves on the paper. If your client simply wants to print out information for business meetings, regular toner is preferable; the waxy residue makes it difficult to write notes on the paper. But if the customer needs the printer for flyers, that residue protects the ink from smearing in wet weather.

Another plus for solid-ink printers is that they are environmentally friendly. "In five years of printing, you'll have enough waste to almost fit in the palm of your hand,"

Powell says. "In that same amount of time, waste from toner cartridges can fill something like a pickup truck."

New printers also have smaller footprints, and many come Ethernet-ready. In addition, hooking up your printer is no longer a day-long process. One wire connects to the server, driver software brings the printer online, and your customer is ready to print quickly and easily.

Where To Go From Here

Printers are faster, better and affordable. So where does the future of printing lie?

"I think the biggest thing we are going to see is the use of wireless," Groka says. "Some products have Bluetooth options, but it will become more standard. If you get to the point where the printer is good, and all you have to do is set it on your desk and turn it on,now we're talking about a great machine that can work for anyone. Small, midsize, large...it won't matter."