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

Issue #1008/1 – IPEX 2010 at the NEC exhibition centre in Birmingham, UK, was the scene for the first showing of several new high-speed continuous feed web production print units – utilising inkjet technology – and pointing the way towards the future of production printing. Could this development ultimately influence the office printing market?

Issue #1006/1 – Q. When is a printer error not a printer error? A. When it is a routine maintenance issue requiring little more than sliding one box out and another box in. Many inkjet printers have a killer-trigger that makes the owner believe there is a serious problem and that the printer could have failed altogether. This is far from the truth and something the manufacturers do not clarify.

Issue #1003/1 – Laser printers and toner supplies are generally perceived as being much cleaner than inkjet printers and ink supplies. But, is this true? We show that just as much mess (if not more) can come from defective toner supplies and that costs associated with them are considerably higher than costs associated with defective ink supplies.

Issue #1002/1 – Along with paper jams and misfeeds, printer supplies are probably the biggest cause of printer downtime and unplanned cost. In this contribution to our series on reliability we have a look at the type of problems that are frequently experienced and what costs are associated with those problems. We begin with inkjet supplies in this article and move on to laser toner supplies in the next article (Part 4b).

Issue 1001/1 – By the time the warranty on a printer or MFP runs out, the whole cost of unreliability changes from what we saw in the previous article ("Forgotten elements of Total Cost of Printing – Reliability – Part 3a, Hardware failures (mechanical and electronic) under warranty"). No longer will the manufacturer just arrange a swap-out on a failed device. Instead, it is necessary to contact either the manufacturer or, more likely, a service agent for the manufacturer and arrange either a service callout or to take the faulty machine in for diagnosis and repair. Picking up where we left off in the last article, here we look at the implications and costs associated with owning a device that is not entirely reliable and fails outside of warranty.