Laser vs Business Ink - which is better?
Traditionally the majority of SME and larger corporate businesses have chosen Laser based print technology to meet document creation requirements for staff and users. Over recent years, high levels of investment have seen Business Ink surge back into contention, offering many genuine benefits to businesses presenting a strong alternative case to Laser technology when considering which is best suited for your business.
Read on to find out how each technology works and most importantly which technology works best for your requirements…
How Laser tech works?
Laser printers and photocopiers providing mono, colour print, copy, scan and fax (Yes.. some businesses still use Fax!) operate a ‘tried and tested’ formula, proven to deliver reliable print performance in office environments for many decades.
The concept of Laser and the way it works can appear complex and you would be forgiven for not realising or truly understanding the number of steps and processes that take place behind the plastic chassis exterior to release a ‘print job’ for a user that simply hits ‘print’. In simple terms, Laser technology temporally sketches the print image onto a drum within the device, once the drum picks up the image, toner particles are transferred from the development tank to the relevant drum using positive and negative charge. Once this has taken place, the drum image is collected by a transfer belt and using a transfer roller moves the image onto the paper. Completing the process, the document passes through a fuser unit at a high level temperature (approx 190 degrees) and the toner particles are fused to the paper. Voila, your document comes out of the exit tray ready for you to collect.
Believe it or not this process takes place across four drums simultaneously all within a matter of several seconds before your print job is released!
The re-emergence of Business Ink
Ink based print technology has burst back onto the print landscape offering many practical benefits for businesses. Historically, Ink based print products have at best provided a reasonable home user device facility, the restricted audience mainly due to the low ink cartridge capacity, with the average yield of an cartridge between 400-800 prints, evolving ink based products into office environments simply put, is a non starter and would result with constant ink cartridge replacement and the requirement to store a high value of stock. Couple the low ink cartridge capacity with a limited range of products in terms of functionality, speeds and robustness directly leads you to why laser products have been understandably favoured.
So……What’ s changed over recent years and how has Business Ink addressed the shortcomings?
Well let’s start with the Achilles Heel of cartridge sizes and most importantly how many prints you are able to get from a new latest generation Business Ink device. The answer; Ink cartridges have evolved into Ink bags and now offer up to 22,500 prints per ink bag based on a standard A3 Colour MFP, not only does this advancement allow for genuine competition to laser technology but also brings your local suppliers into the mix to be able to offer these products via the popular and preferential cost per copy mechanism.
The value of the cost per copy model
A model in the past which has generally been dominated by Laser. Opening the cost per copy (cpc) market up for end users utilising Business Ink is a game changer and warrants a section for itself.
For those unaware of what the cost per copy model consists of, simply put, companies pay a mono cost per print and a colour cost per print. The print devices are ‘metered’ in a similar ilk to the way gas and electrical works domestically. At the end of each month or quarter, a meter reading is taken from the print device and a bill is generated based on the number of prints produced and multiplied by the cost per copies. For example purposes, lets assume the cost per copies are 0.004 (0.4 pence) mono and 0.04 (4 pence) colour and the the photocopier prints 10,000 mono prints and 5,000 colour prints for the month, the bill generated would be 0.004 x 10,000 mono prints = £40.00 + 0.04 x 5,000 colour prints = £200.00, therefore, a total bill of £240.00. The cost per copies provided cover all toners supplies, replaceable maintenance items (drums, fusers, transfer belts, etc) along with on-site engineer service and support amongst other benefits. The advantages to businesses of having the devices supplied by a local supplier on a cost per copy span across multiple areas.
Firstly, you have the finance and value incentive, a print supplier spending tonnes of thousands of pounds on print consumables per month is naturally going to be able to offer the end user a substantial discount due to procurement power and the ability to buy in bulk transactions. Complimenting the reduced costs, finance departments also receive the welcome benefit of having greater control of expenditure to help accounts budgeting through the removal of ad-hoc ink cartridge purchasing.
It’s also wise to place value and acknowledge the time spent by office managers, buyers, finance departments and procurement teams for each time supplies need to be ordered. Often, solely print related, several invoices can be being raised on a monthly basis, a process which incurs sourcing, procuring the best deal and raising multiple invoices which is completely unnecessary in comparison to receiving a single, simple invoice per month for print usage.
Next up, let’s touch on the other deliverables which are inclusive within a Managed Print Service which Business Ink now has exposure.
As with most technology and hardware with a reliance on moving mechanical parts and processes, invariably print devices will go wrong occasionally and require routine maintenance. Rarely do businesses have individuals with the qualified skillsets to adequately manage and repair print devices, even more so if the devices are spread across multiple sites. Furthermore, if there is a technician style individual within the organisation, is their time going to best spent fixing faulty multifunction print devices? Of course it isn’t. For these reasons alone, the value of having local service and support providing fast, qualified contracted, on-site engineer response times should be obvious. If it’s not obvious, start considering the cost to a business which is unable to print invoices, despatch notes, XXXX, sales proposals, health and safety information, HR compliance along with other general office documentation or pulling an IT Manager away from critical business tasks to fix a photocopier.
Intrinsically linked to the above content i.e. a lack of productivity to staff and an inability to print business critical documents brings up the worthwhile mention of consumable supplies. Running out of consumable supplies presents the same challenges, ultimately, downtime to your business and is another ‘valuable service deliverable’ from using the cost per copy model. The only ‘fail safe’ to counter act running out of toners is to ‘over stock’ supplies which makes little to zero sense. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to appreciate that shelling out cost to carry excessive stock is not best practise and over stocking ink or toner supplies is no different, what compounds this practise is printer and photocopier manufacturers use specific supplies for specific models, meaning, a business over stocking could purchase hundreds of pounds worth of stock to sit on the shelf, the photocopier could then break down and be beyond repair making hundreds of pounds worth of stock redundant. A negative financial connotation and also bad news for the environment.
The beauty of a Manged Print Solution when delivered through a reputable supplier is the inclusion of fully automated toner supplies. Clever intuitive software seamlessly runs in the background monitoring toner or ink levels with proactive ‘alerts’ at certain thresholds to ensure businesses are receiving supplies before they need them, negating the need to carry stock or for any individual to be manually, monitoring the levels internally.
To round off, let’s not forget about the environmental side of the equation. We’ll all be aware of the global effort taking place on many levels towards sustainability. One of the drawbacks to purchasing devices and ordering supplies as opposed to the cost per copy concept is when the device becomes problematic requiring a replacement maintenance part, businesses often take a financial view to dispose of the device and procure a new printer or photocopier, this is commonly known as a ‘buy it, bin it’ strategy. The environmental impact to this type of strategy only increases plastic being placed in landfill and is not sustainable. In contrary to the ‘buy it, bin it’ strategy is the cost per copy service centred around running devices to their maximum lifespan negating unnecessary landfill.
Diving into the specifics
So far, we’ve identified the advancements from Business Ink to close the gap with Laser on the toner supply capacity side and the variation of engines and products offering different speeds, functionality and reliability to cater for different sized office environments but both technologies are very different and have benefits in their own merit which are worth touching upon.
Environmental Impact
Generally speaking the environmental performance of most hardware is measured through a TEC value issued by the manufacturer. TEC values can be used to make comparisons between legacy and replacement technology and this information will be accepted by recognised accreditation bodies such as ISO 14001, environmental improvements can also be noted within important CSR and environmental policies.
As highlighted above, the laser process is made up of several stages which take place before a print job is released. From print drums, imaging units, development tanks, transfer belts and rollers, fuser units - these are all routinely replaceable maintenance items mainly made from plastic components with life cycles. Business Ink on the other hand, boasts a simpler process, using far fewer replacement plastic parts and in turn tends to have a lower TEC value verses a laser product.
It should be noted that emerging Business Ink manufacturers have shifted to ‘heat free print technology’. This is a smart move in consideration for the environment, referring back to the laser technology, in a similar way to boiling a kettle at home, their is dependency on high temperature levels in the region of up to 190 degrees which is a key requirement for toner particles to be fused to the paper. Why is this important and relevant? Because generating higher device temperatures requires far more power consumption, subsequently having a negative environmental impact. Business Inks ‘Heat free print technology’ is ‘what it says on the tin’ and the removal of heat is advantageous for the associated TEC value and businesses looking to reduce energy costs.
On balance, it would be wrong not to mention a few emerging forward-thinking Laser manufacturers which have taken strides towards reducing the TEC values from using different toner biomass formulations and reduced fusing temperatures. Naturally, this has improved the Co2 impact but is still lagging behind heat free print technology, an outcome likely to be the case over the short-medium term future.
Business Integration
As most businesses have already migrated to cloud based services such as Microsoft 365, Sharepoint, Google Docs, etc and moved away from maintaining in-house servers, it’s important photocopiers are able to embrace and support this new way of working. Laser technology scores highly for business integration and Business Ink has some work to do to catch up.
Moving systems and file storage to the cloud isn’t new but as businesses realise the benefits from not managing IT infrastructure internally, moving print servers has been slightly trickier in the past. Certain Laser technology manufacturers recognised the ‘serverless printing’ landscape trend and are able to boast ‘out of the box’ features to support moving to a fully cloud delivered solution, enabling users to send direct print jobs straight to the printer, but all management and print policy is still recorded in the cloud.
Meanwhile, that’s not to say it’s impossible to achieve with Business Ink, but the approach to getting there is more clunky due to Business Ink requiring software to act as a ‘middle-man’.
Speeds, Feeds and Functionality
Let’s get started with image quality and colour representation - the importance of the colour and quality largely depends on your type of business. For some businesses who regularly produce customer facing documents, it’s absolutely critical. For other businesses, who tend to print internal facing documents, it’s not so important. Market feedback seems to indicate a preference towards Business Ink providing a better quality of image on the production of pictures and photographs, however, interestingly a recent survey suggests the opposite for ‘text heavy’ documents which lent towards Laser scoring higher.
Touching on range variation offered and the peripheral options available for businesses when specifying a new device i.e. variation of speeds, paper tray configurations and finishing options, whilst Business Ink has certainly improved over recent years, enabling businesses to add staple finishing modules to devices, that said, they still fall slightly short, as finishing options are generally restricted to certain models unlike Laser which provide greater depth of flexibility across model ranges.
In the case of speed - there are two note worthy elements that should be considered. Firstly, pages per minute (PPM), for example, how many pages per minute is the device capable of printing. Secondly, first time print speed (FTPS), this denotes the speed between hitting the ‘ print’ button and how long it takes for the device to release the first print page. Clearly, the different examples illustrated lend themselves to different environments. An organisation requiring fast print release and only producing averagely 1-2 pages would feel the benefit from the Business Ink technology, however, a business averagely printing 30-40 pages per document would take greater reward from a laser device offering 40 pages per minute speed. Both technologies have their advantages within certain environments and due diligence should take place around the end user objective.
Summary and Analysis
On reflection, both sets of technology have their strengths and weaknesses. One could argue, the trajectory and momentum swing sits with Business Ink for closing the gap considerably over recent years. That said, Business Ink will not suit every style of business and is not on the same level as Laser for certain business environments.
Whilst certain industries would thrive utilising Business Ink under the prospect of faster first time print speeds others will struggle with the limited business integration included, an area Laser excels within .
The importance of consultation and taking the time to understand user, departmental and site print requirements should not be over looked, particularly as contracts usually have a standard minimum duration of 3-5 years. A thorough investigative approach will stand the test of time establishing the business needs of today and of the future.
There is potential scope, through a true independent supplier, supplying and supporting Laser Technology and Business Ink to ‘have the best of both worlds’ and benefit from a bespoke, hybrid solution all managed by the same supplier within a centralised managed print policy.
One thing that cannot be denied, is the fast moving developments taking place within the business print space which make for an interesting watch in the future to see how things unfold.