TCPglobal - news, views and issues on total cost of printing

Issue 0925/2 - You know how you receive lots of emails containing special offers for this and that? Just received is a mail containing 18 offers! This isn’t what is extraordinary though - 12 of the offers (two-thirds, 67%) involve printers and no less than eight printer manufacturers are represented. These are Brother, Canon, Dell, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Konica Minolta, Oki, Xerox. — END –

Issue #0923/1 – As we enter the ‘new year’, post summer holidays, businesses are still able to take advantage of a great opportunity to acquire a projector free of charge. Projectors are being used by Samsung as an incentive to buy Samsung printers and MFPs – not for much longer though – offer ends in the last week of September.

Issue #0920/2 – A massive 47% price increase on the Ricoh SP C232SF, as units bought (by the supplier used as the price source in last week’s article) under a special purchase came to an end, demonstrates more clearly than ever before that the purchase price is almost entirely irrelevant to the long-term Total Cost of Printing of a printer, AiO or MFP.

Issue #0910/2 – Twenty five years seems to have passed rather too rapidly for my liking but, having worked alongside the IT/printer industry since the days of Hewlett-Packard’s LaserJet II and the first Apple LaserWriter, it amazes me that newly announced laser printers are still able to cause excitement – but, from time to time, they certainly do. While the technology and the market have both come a long way, Hewlett-Packard’s celebrations of a quarter century of LaserJet production seem to be very low-key, especially considering how many Hewlett-Packard laser printers must still be in use and the implications that has on companies offering a Managed Print Service (MPS).

Issue #0910/1 – As follow-up to the TCPglobal article "Printer manufacturers are keen to encourage printer sales by any means necessary and – is Lexmark breaking the law in the process?", printer users are able to take advantage of a wide range of special offers from Hewlett-Packard around the world, notably in the US where cashback rebates as high as $1,000 are available on laser printers. The breadth and scale of the offers further underline the desperation of printer manufacturers to keep product moving, prevent a build-up of inventory and ensure that the effect of the current financial downturn on revenue and market share is minimised.