Print Smart and Save Big Money

Technology is upgraded when a better solution is discovered that will save you money. As a business owner, this is the preferred way to save money, instead of having to make dreaded cuts. One technology that you can easily upgrade to, will put extra money back into your budget, are your printers.

Printers are a great candidate for your next upgrade because they are one of the most expensive pieces of equipment in your office to maintain. Before you upgrade your printer, or any piece of technology, it makes good budgeting sense to first determine how much your current printing setup is costing you. Armed with this knowledge, you can calculate how much the savings from your new printing upgrade will add up to, and then use the extra money to budget for bigger and better things.

To help you put some real numbers behind how much your printers are costing you, here are four questions that you will want to look at in order to determine how much it costs to print every page:

• How many printers are in your office?
• How many pages are printed by each device?
• What is the color vs. black and white print ratio per printer?
• What type of toner is used, how much does it cost, and how often is it purchased?

It's difficult to give a standard formula that will work for every business because every organization has different printing needs. For example, a graphic design firm will use more color toner, which is much more expensive than a business that only prints internal memos and TPS reports. To help your business determine an accurate estimate on your printing costs, you can consult an extensive 2012 study by QualityLogic.

This study gives solid figures we can look at. To help give you an understanding of how much it costs per page for you to print something off, we will look at the United States portion of this study and consider the low end and high end of inkjet printers.

Black and White Printing

• High End: $0.095 per page with the HP F4580.
• Low End: $0.023 per page with the HP 8600.

Color Printing

• High End: $0.203 per page with the HP 4580.
• Low End: $0.104 per page with the HP 8600.

Photo Printing

• High End: $0.767 with the Lexmark S515.
• Low End: $0.264 with the HP 8600.

Some of these price differences are more than two-times, based on what printing models you go with. If your business is using an inefficient printer, then you are losing small change with every print, which will quickly add up over time. Taking a little extra time to shop for an economical printer will save you big money that will more than pay for the price of a better quality printer. In fact, usually the printers that have the cheapest price tags are often the most expensive to maintain.

Another way that you can save on printing is to enact printing best practices. Here are a just a few that you can implement to bring down the cost per page:

• Use the grayscale setting to print a black and white document.
• Look for a way to share a document digitally instead of printing it.
• Shrink documents and print multiple docs on one page.
• Reuse the back side of scrap paper.

There are many more tips you can take to reduce your printing cost. The overall theme here is to think twice before hitting "Print," and to be aware of your printing habits. If you don't take the time to optimize your printing to save ink, then your printer will automatically print in the highest quality settings, draining your ink cartridge quickly.

One of the biggest printing solutions that will save your business money is upgrading to a print server solution from Computerware. One print server solution advantage is that it can automatically enforce these money saving best practices across every printer on your network. This is a much more convenient way to enforce these cost-saving practices than posting a page of printing tips next to every printer.

A print server solution can also save you money by consolidating the number of printing units used. Before we install your new print server solution, Computerware will analyze your network and find the most efficient way to set up everything. Of course, the first printers we would ditch would be the models that cost you the most money to maintain, like the infamous HP 4580. Another benefit to upgrading to a print server is that it will handle all of your printing network traffic, thus freeing up the amount of resources used by your server.

To find how much money a print server solution can save your company, call Computerware at (703) 821-8200.