Copywriting Example - Editorial in Business550 colour printing supplement Colour Control Go back to the early 90s and a colour laser printer would have cost you £17,000 and taken 2 minutes to print a single page. Since then, prices have tumbled and printers are rather faster. Now you can buy well specified colour lasers from around £300 and up. Consumables prices have fallen, too, but running costs are still a worry for many users. The benefits of inhouse colour printing are well understood. Attention is readily drawn to your key messages, improving comprehension, and it’s even been shown that invoices can be paid more quickly. There is a growing need for short run colour printing, as marketing departments strive to target customers with more relevant messages. Those short print runs can be prohibitively expensive by litho, but an inhouse colour laser printer will do the job more economically and on demand. Moreover, you enjoy the proven benefits of using variable data for personalisation. When it comes to colour printing, the wide range of choices can be bewildering … occasional colour on an inkjet, a wide range of colour lasers from budget options to printers costing several thousand pounds, outsourcing, leasing, fixed cost per page, pay as you go … the list seems endless. How can you be sure you’re making the right decision? Mark Burnham, Business Development Manager at Printware, offers this advice: “Customers come to us with different priorities. Some want a cheap box off the shelf. Others make running costs their main consideration, possibly learning from past experience. Our advice is always to examine the total cost of ownership (TCO)”. The TCO comprises many elements, not all of them at first obvious: delivery, installation, disposal, user training, warranties and maintenance as well as the purchase price and cost of consumables. Burnham goes on to say “Our starting point is always to understand the needs of our customer. When we know what type of documents are to be printed and in what volumes, then we can suggest the best fit solution based on the TCO”. Assessing your anticipated print volume is vital to your choice of printer. The illustration shows how a popular desktop printer is cheaper to run for under 1000 pages per month, but with higher volumes you can achieve a lower TCO by choosing a more expensive model. How much coverage of toner you have on each page drastically affects the cost of printing, and should be kept in mind when creating your documents. If your creative urges get the better of you, it’s quite possible for your prints to cost you 50p or more. On the other hand, conservative use of colour will bring your documents alive and typically cost less than 5p per print. If controlling your coverage is difficult, Printware’s PagePack agreement could slash your printing costs. Based on the Xerox Phaser 7750, you can have fixed cost colour printing for between 8.5p and 11p per page – for any coverage. PagePack is also available across the Xerox range of colour copier/printers, and depending on your usage, rates as low as 6.5p per page can be achieved. Here’s the clever bit: A3 pages cost the same as A4. So you have the option of printing two A4 documents to an A3 page, bringing the final cost down to little more than 3p per page! Printware are the UK’s number one reseller of colour laser printers. For more information on their products and services phone 0870 380 3700, or email colour@printware.co.uk
Graham
Godfrey, Southsea, Hampshire, UK |
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