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

Issue #1005/2 – Following the unrest and strike action by Hewlett-Packard Staff (EDS employees) in the UK and parts of Europe over recent months (see "Hewlett-Packard’s need to return profit is showing cracks"), it is now reported that Hewlett-Packard’s rejection from the public sector bidding list in the UK has been confirmed – despite appealing against the original decision.

Issue #1004/1 – Guess what? A full eight weeks after placing the order for Dell supplies from the Dell website ("Reasons to buy printers from Dell – are there any?"), the order was finally delivered! This is only eight weeks of printer downtime – what is wrong with that? Can you imaging not being able to print an invoice for your customers for eight weeks? Or print a proposal, quotation, business intelligence report, or any number of other business-critical documents for eight weeks? Having just completed a series of articles on the costs associated with unreliability, let’s consider the potential impact of not being able to print for nearly two months.

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.