OT photocopier servicing

[Gordon Freeman]

Our office needs a new copier/printer and conventional wisdom seems to be that you must get a service agreement or lease or you'll end up with lots of problems, but I wonder if that is really the case?

The office prints or copies about 4-5000 pages a month (=about 150 a day) and an A4 copier that meets this volume can be had for as little as ?250 with a one-year onsite warranty. I can't help feeling that this should be enough without having to go for a fullblown service agreement, has anyone got experience of this?

Given that lease+service agreements seem to cost hundreds per quarter my feeling is that it would be cheaper to just buy a machine (and maybe pay another ?100 to extend the onsite warranty to 3 years), and then simply chuck the copier if it becomes unmanageble and get another. But the office manager is scared that they may get stuck with problems that a warranty wouldn't address (maybe paper jams etc?) and have to pay lots of ad hoc servicing bills. Am I being too naive about the tribulations of copiers? I should say that I normally work from home so I'm not the person who has to deal with demonic office equipment when it malfunctions!

[Bill Wright]

Beware the trick some of the service people use. They sometimes put the microswitch that counts copy numbers a little way to one side, so it records every copy twice. Of course no-one has any real idea how many copies have been done so you end up paying for twice as many service visits.

I have abandoned copiers and now use an A3 scanner that is set to print automatically via a laser printer. This solution might not be suitable if there are a lot of users, some of whom will be stupid.

Bill

[Tony Bryer]

For my last years in UK I bought a Canon GP225 copy printer with six bins and PC interface, cost £4600 in 1999 and it was printing your sort of volume. When I started my research leasing seemed a good deal, then I found that the buy price for these commercial copiers is about 50% of list, thus enabling leasing companies to offer deals that look really good. Even then it was a lot of money for a one person business to spend, but was balanced by dirt cheap running expenses and the convenience of multiple bins (each of our leaflets was printed on different colour stock). toner cartridges £30 IIRC for about 8,000 sides. As I had very good experience with the engineer who had maintained my previous copiers, I signed up with them for contract maintenance something like £40pcm.

So over the eight years I had it (it was still running fine when I emigrated but I gave it to the guy in the next office), assuming 4,000 sides a month, £4600 + 96x£40 + 48 x £30 = £9880, or about 2.5p per side all in. That was mono of course, colour wasn't an option back then.

All in it was one of my best purchases: buying a machine with a rated workload of something like 25K sides pcm and using it for a fraction of this meant there was very little trouble. A lot of problems in large offices are down to abuse - paper clips going where they shouldn't, damp paper, paper not fanned out before being put in tray etc.

[Tim Watts]

Perhaps 2 cheap copiers could be better for that volume?

If one breaks you have the other. I'd do a cost anaylsis of:

Big machine with servicing

vs

2 cheap machines, no servicing and expect to replace every 2 years.

You also have to factor in:

Staff time - if the cheap machine is a slow and temperamental PoS, you will waste a lot of several people's time.

Servicing: Even with a very high end contract like we had at a London Uni, and a servicing engineer who stored some common parts on site (we gave him a cupboard because we had 8 machines) and who was usually in the area as he was dedicated to us and several other outfits in South Ken, you can still be waiting 4 hours with a broken machine.

In reality for a small office with no leverage, you'll be lucky if you see the guy the same day.

[Tim Watts]

I will recommend the Canon iR series.

We trialled a GP - the mechanics seemed good, but one of our students broke the imaging engine (the software part) when he (with our blessing as we were testing the thing) ran a Postscript program to generate and print PI to 1 million dec places.

It got stuck and because it cached the job to disk, we were unable to stop the job - even with a power cycle. The cancel job option did not reset the imaging engine - it seemed to want to let that complete but simply not run the output to the printing engine (seemed a bit dumb).

I tried the "format disk" option I found in a sub menu that did not prompt for the admin PIN we had set. It did a little more formatting than I expected for a front panel easy to access command! Needed an engineer to re-load the software. It was at that point Canon said perhaps an iR series would be better for us...

They were right - we had very little trouble with those and they were absolutely hammered. And the PI program did not break them...

[michael adams]

I would have thought your invoices for copy paper would have given quite a good idea. Unless of course paper manufacturers and suppliers are all in league with leasing companies and only put half as many sheets in a bundle as is printed on the label.

michael adams

...

[Tim Watts]

Trivial to check though - print 10 sheet sand see what the counter does.

Also as this detector is part of the main control loop, buggering it up to dual count will almost certainly break the machine which will think its jammed or something.

[cl]

I second the above poster's idea of two cheap machines. I ran a small

1.5 - 2 person business for many years and having two printers was often a lifesaver. In our case they were actually two different printers, a B&W Laser workhorse and a colour inkjet but the inkjet's ability to print B&W resonably effectively when the Laser's toner had run out or I was having serious issues with the Window's drivers often saved much tearing of hair.

[Peter Johnson]

I don't remember the last time I had a problem with paper static, must be well over 10 years. It's certainly a long time since I fanned out paper before loading it.

[Andrew Gabriel]

When we first got a postscript printer at work in the mid 1980's, I sent it a program to calculate a mandelbrot image. It took me many goes, because I hadn't realised it would take hours, and other people seeing this tiny 200 byte job stuck on the printer kept turning it off and on again. Eventually I got my printout by leaving it running overnight.

[news]

Yes but only because I was asked to check costs, I am not involved with running it other than as one of 22 users. Ours is a konica minolta 280 A3 networked printer on a leasing agreement (. We print about 73k Black and 17k colour per quarter (often only the logo is the coloured bit). The £1000/qtr lease covers call outs and toner but I think other parts have to be paid for. We have an allowance of 17k black and 10k colour/qtr and the monthly maintenance and toner splits

60:40 black to colour or vice versa.

Anyway it looks like the black costs run out about 1/10 penny and colour over 6 pence.

We would be far better off with a black A4 laser for 90% of out work and dumping the service agreement.

I have yet to check whether the counter counts 2 for an A3 copy.

AJH

[michael adams]

Or even one, come to think of it. So much for checking invoices.

Oops!

michael adams

...

see what the counter does.

[Bill Wright]

Not when the paper is used for many different purposes.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

In my case it didn't bugger the machine up, and I found at what was happening because I was idly watching the counter one day. At the time I had a contract that took me into various schools across the region, and I noticed that the same copier firm was in a lot of them, so I started talking to the secretaries and getting them to check, and sure enough they had the same thing. A total scam. I should mention this was quite a long time ago. The copier firm, incidentally, disappeared a few years later.

Bill

[cl]

Some printers tell you not to do this.

[Graham.]

That might explain this:

[Gordon Freeman]

There's actually two mono laser printers scattered around the offices already, an old HP one which just works and works and a Brother one which is a PoS (like all Brother equipment IME), forever suffering paper jams etc. So anyway it's only the copying and document scanning which the copier is absolutely critical for since at a pinch printouts can be rerouted to one of the lasers as long as their associated PCs are turned on.

But given that a 7000/month duty cycle copier can be had for just ?250, it's certainly an interesting thought that we could just buy two. I think the manager might like the idea of having his own personal copier instead of the crappy Brother machine currently lurking under the desk, the only question is if there would be room for it.

[Gordon Freeman]

Yes, I've discovered this site

which warns of this, also that sometimes the colour meters register a copy for each of the 4 toners thus quadrupling the count, and sometimes mono copies are counted as colour or A4 landscape as A3 (which counts as two copies under our present lease agreement). I am intending to check our machine to see if one copy registers as one or not since I'm very suspicious about the claimed colour copy volume.

As for what another poster said about simply checking how much paper you've bought, this isn't necessarily a good guide since most machines can do automatic two-sided copying so you could genuinely be doing up to twice the number of copies as sheets of paper you buy.

[Tim Watts]

To meter by A4 "impressions" makes reasonable sense and I have seen this

- the copier is doing proportionality more work.

But I have never heard of the 4 colours tripping a count each.

[polygonum]

+1