PRINTOUTS LEADS TO PROFITS

[Anonymous]

Printouts leads to profits
New standards in ISO test may change the way printing consumables are seen     
One
of the biggest margin generators for anyone selling printers is
consumables. Like most hardware, the devices themselves offer little in
the way of profit, but they can be bottomless pits for ink and toner
over their lifetimes, and that means dollars in the reseller’s
pocket.The trouble from the consumer’s point of view is that they have
no idea how many printouts to expect from any given printer before it’s
time to bite the bullet and cough up for fresh ink or toner, meaning
all too many emergency trips to the store.If the printer is a model
that’s been around for a while, the reseller may have an notion of how
long the ink will last, based on experience, and can offer advice. But
for new printers, actual page count per cartridge is anyone’s guess.
Every manufacturer measures number of pages per cartridge in the most
advantageous way for its products.There is hope. The International
Organization for Standardization (ISO) has approved the ISO/IEC
24711:2006 standard defining the method for the determination of ink
cartridge yield for colour inkjet printers and multi-function devices
that contain printer components (ISO/IEC 19798, published at the end of
2006, and 19752, published in 2004, respectively deal with colour and
monochrome toner).This standard provides a way to consistently
determine yield across products, instead of relying on the standard
crock of per cent coverage that’s been foisted on us for so many years.
With no consistent definition of what that percentage actually
represented (all one colour, all text, images, whatever), it has been
virtually impossible to figure out which printers were most economical
to run, or what to expect in real world usage.

Members of the
International Committee for Information Technology Standards, including
most market leading printer vendors such as Canon, Dell, Epson, HP,
Kodak, Lexmark, Okidata and Xerox, have announced their support for the
new standards, which specify the conditions and test suite used to
determine cartridge yield.Each test is performed in the printer’s
default mode (no more cheating by using draft mode for tests, then
defaulting to standard mode out of the box), and consists of exhausting
a minimum of nine cartridges by continuously printing a defined set of
PDF documents on 8.5 x 11 inch or A4 paper, using at least three
printers to account for production anomalies. Even the ambient
temperature is controlled (23 celsius, +/- 2 degrees), since that, too,
can affect results.While this still doesn’t reflect how people print in
the real world (a few pages at a time, perhaps with days between print
jobs), it’s at least consistent across manufacturers so consumers and
resellers can make a more realistic comparison of printing systems. And
the emphasis is on systems – a printer and cartridge combination, not
the just particular type of cartridge or a specific printer model. The
same cartridge may perform differently in different printer models.The
hope is that the ISO-rated yield will ultimately be shown on each
cartridge’s packaging, giving consumers who actually read labels a clue
how often they’ll be shopping for ink, and giving resellers an
opportunity to build loyalty by explaining the ratings so those
emergency ink runs are no longer necessary.

[Author]

May 15, 2007 at 2:04 PM