Xerox slashes cost of colour printing

Solid ink scales up to challenge departmental lasers

Xerox has launched in the UK its ColorQube printers, which aim to make colour documents as affordable as black-and-white printing for enterprise customers, as well as reducing waste and cutting the volume of consumables that IT departments have to store.

Shipping to European resellers now, the ColorQube 9200 range brings Xerox's solid ink printing technology into a departmental multi-function printer (MFP) for the first time.

The three models are similar in purchase price to comparable laser printers, but reduce waste by up to 90 per cent and the cost of printing in colour by 50 per cent, according to the firm.

"We're making colour more affordable, more easy to use, and with less impact on the environment. We believe this will significantly change the shape of printing in the office for years to come," said Mark Boyt, European Office Product marketing manager at Xerox.

According to Boyt, only 15 per cent of pages printed are currently in colour, largely due to reasons of cost. Charges for colour pages can be ten times that for black-and-white, so companies naturally clamp down on colour prints.

"But colour can bring value to a document, so we're taking the cost of colour out of the equation and making it the same as for black-and-white," he claimed.

Solid ink printing is nothing new – Xerox acquired it from Tektronix in 2000 – but the technology has been scaled up to support A3 prints and combined with Xerox's MFP functionality to meet enterprise demands.

The technology uses solid inks that are melted and sprayed onto the page as droplets, in a manner not dissimilar from inkjet printing. But because the inks are solid at room temperature, they can be supplied in blocks that are simply dropped into the printer, rather than being contained in a cartridge.

"People can easily refill the machine themselves – they don’t have to call an engineer because there are no cartridges to be changed," said Boyt.

One of the first customers for the new printers is supermarket chain Tesco, which cites waste reduction as one of the reasons it chose Xerox.

"There are no toner cartridges to be recycled, and the consumables take up much less storage space," said Nick Folkes, the company's IT director for group information and operations.

Folkes said he had been interested in Xerox's solid ink technology for a while, but until now they had been "too small – they weren't divisional printers. It needed something like this – able to do everything a laser can do today," he said.

In one department, Tesco has now got rid of 20 to 30 standard printers and replaced them with two or three ColorQubes to serve the same 200 staff, he said, thus saving energy and contributing to Tesco's aim of cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions.

Customers will also see savings through Xerox's hybrid colour charging scheme, according to Xerox Channel Marketing manager Sebastiaan Crebolder.

This works by analysing each printed page and classifying it as one of three categories, depending upon the amount of colour used. The printer tracks how many of each is printed.

Black and limited colour pages are charged at 0.5p per page, while "everyday colour" is charged at 2.75p per page, and "expressive colour" such as a full-page image, is charged at 5.5p per page.

About 75 percent of prints will fall into the first category, according to Crebolder, "so we can guarantee customers will save money," he said.

The ColorQube printers are differentiated on print speed, with the ColorQube 9201 supporting a standard speed of up to 50 colour pages per minute (PPM), while the ColorQube 9202 print 60ppm, and 70ppm for the ColorQube 9203.

All three printers support copy, scan and fax functions as well as printing, and have a standard paper capacity of 7,300 sheets. This can be expanded with additional feeders, plus accessories such as an automatic stapler and booklet maker are available.

Prices start at £13,491 for the 9201, £14,401 for the 9202, and £16,491 for the 9203.