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A few years ago when your office printed a lot of paper, it was important to manage costs by restricting users from printing in color. If a color page costs 10 cents and black and white costs 1-2 cents, you’d want to make sure that color pages were printed only when necessary.

The problem is that those black and white pages just didn’t look as good as they could. Your beautiful logo was turned into a dull grayscale, graphics and bar charts were tough to read. There was a disconnect between what you saw on your colour monitor, and what was on the printed pages.

But, if you are like most companies, you don’t print as much today as you once did. Studies indicated that the average office employee now prints less than 6 pages per day, where once they printed over 10. That daily rate will continue to fall. And now, thanks to some innovative new printing technologies, the costs for each printed color page are also plummeting. How?

Welcome to the world of office PageWide ink!

Not everything you print needs color, word documents, invoices and spreadsheets my contain little color beyond a logo or a text link URL. So providing color to these pages should be relatively inexpensive, but more colorful documents such as PDFs or images contain much more. Still, if you average it all out, a color page on some new equipment from Epson and Hewlett Packard is often less than 5 cents a page. If only half of those documents even require colour, then your cost per page might average less than 3 cents per page.

These lower costs are achievable with newer office printers that no longer rely on older laser printing. 

Smaller supplies that print the same amount of pages are better for the environment. They also enable the manufacturer to put a lot more functionality into the device. In the above example, you can have a color MFP (print, scan, copy and fax) that can easily print over 3,000 pages per month, and it sits on a desktop. In some offices, these smaller, higher-functioning devices can be distributed around the office instead of requiring employees to walk to a bigger centralized device.

If you think about it, restricting color made sense a few years ago when employees' default activity was to print files. That’s no longer the case. A color document is 78% more likely to be remembered. If we are only considering the straight up cost of a document, color may always be a little bit more expensive, but when you consider that it is now much more convenient to employees, the extra few pennies per day for each employee are likely worth the investment.

Would you like to see how a new HP PageWide printer could help your business? Contact your Digitex rep today, or visit www.digitex.ca.