Can Your School Afford to Print and Copy in Color?
By: David Murphy
Funding for your operating budget is tighter than ever. While administrators and educators desperately explore new ways to reduce costs without sacrificing the quality of our children’s educations, many are running out of ideas.
Where to Cut Corners?
The top four budget items in most schools are: 1) salaries & benefits, 2) facilities maintenance, 3) textbooks & instructional materials, and 4) copying & printing supplies.
So, how can we improve efficiencies to get more for less? Certainly, most administrators consider these top three items as last-resort untouchables, as they should. The best option here for our children is not fewer teachers with lower pay, neglect/closure of facilities, or reduced quality/quantity of instructional materials.
Breaking Through the Clutter With Color
Placing aggressive restrictions on teachers’ supplies usage is not only unpopular, it doesn’t help the students either. What does help is communicating to students in a way that helps them retain the information. One proven method is printing instructional materials in color.
Most people know that the use of color is highly effective in tapping into human emotion and memory and in the improvement of the learning process. Numerous studies by Loyola University and others have revealed that messages printed in color are 78% more likely to be remembered and that comprehension of facts improves by up to 73% when presented to the reader in color.
By most estimates, a typical American consumer in a major metro area (students and adults alike) receives up to 5,000 marketing messages per day through a variety of media. People receive messages in color via their color TVs, computers, video iPods, and smart phones. Magazines and newspapers are printed in color.
So, why do educators communicate with students with black toner on white paper? Is it because black and white printing costs less than color? What is the cost of a child’s missed opportunity to learn?
What Are the Current Choices for Color?
With this knowledge that color is a more effective communication tool than black and white, school administrators must next determine the best method to print educational materials in color. What are the available choices for color copying and printing?
First, low-priced personal color printers from “big box” electronics stores are not the best answer, but they can be found in most school offices and even classrooms. These small devices may have low hardware costs, but their real operating costs can be prohibitive for printing class-size documents. Consider that the cost of a color inkjet cartridge is about $36. What most people don’t realize that the yield averages only 300 pages or so per cartridge, resulting in a cost per page of 12 cents or more.
What about toner-based color copiers and laser printers? Recently, street prices of MFPs (multi-function printers) have declined to more attractive levels, motivating some schools to use color MFPs to print a limited number of special-purpose educational documents. Most mid-size color MFPs are sold with fixed cost-per-copy charges of between six to eight cents. Office equipment vendors generally include the MFP’s maintenance and supplies (excluding paper) into this cost per copy (CPC). Compare this color CPC of six to eight cents to the half-cent CPC of most black & white MFPs, and color can be difficult to justify for schools’ printing needs.
In addition to the operating costs of color MFPs, school administrators also need to consider the reliability and durability of these devices in handling high volumes over several years. Purchasers generally expect their equipment to last as long as a 48-month to 60-month lease term, but in high-volume multi-user environments, MFPs may wear out sooner.
Why is that? MFPs and copiers typically use an electrophotographic heat process that fuses toner to the paper at very high temperatures. As copy volumes increase on equipment not designed for high volume, so do paper jams and equipment service calls. As many teachers have learned, copier breakdowns often occur during the six minutes between class periods while they are in the middle of copying worksheets and handouts for their next class.
A New Alternative for Color Printing
Recently, however, new high-speed, low-cost color inkjet printing technologies have been developed and introduced to the school market. These new high-speed inkjet printers do not use toner, fuser, or any heat process, so they are capable of handling high volumes with minimal downtime and a very low operating cost. The special inkjet imaging technology is called Piezo and runs cool, reliably, and with a small fraction of the power consumption of electrophotographic printers. As for speed and productivity, top speeds are currently at 120 pages per minute, whether printing in color or monochrome.
Because of their short, straight paper path and cool imaging process, these high-speed inkjet printers are both reliable and versatile. With these inkjet devices, schools can easily print colorful and personalized instructional materials for each student, including worksheets, tests, note cards, construction paper, and even envelopes.
Okay, but what about the cost? Typically, the color operating cost of these new inkjet printers averages less than half of what most comparable color copiers cost. Generally, this is in the range of two to three cents per page, depending on the amount of image coverage on the document. For black and white documents, the cost is about the same as most laser printers.
So, we started with the question of whether your school could afford to print and copy in color? With the low CPC of these new inkjet printers, the incremental cost for color is only slightly higher than the cost of black & white pages created on MFPs. Educators’ logical expectation is that students will retain and remember their lessons and facts when they read them with color highlighted text and graphics.
With this objective, along with the side benefits of higher speed, greater reliability, and lower operating costs, it is likely that more schools will be exploring the potential of this new color printing technology.
David Murphy is the vice president of marketing for RISO, Inc., www.us.riso.com.
