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Managing Color Costs
With Technology
We're now three-quarters of the way into this year of uncertainty and most of our clients are budgeting for 2009, still not sure what the economy will do. If you're belt-tightening, managing color costs is an area ripe for consideration mainly because color printing is so much more expensive than black-and-white printing -- at least 10-20 times more expensive!
Why is color so much more expensive?
Two reasons: (1) The toner itself costs more, but also (2) the page coverage tends to be much greater than monochrome. When you print/copy a text document, toner coverage on a page is typically 8-10%. But when you use color, graphics can drive coverage up 100% (full bleed). More toner consumed makes the per-page cost so much higher. The average monochrome page can be less than two cents a page; a color page can be as much as 50 cents depending on the printer model and, of course, the coverage.
What then is the best way to manage color costs? One word: "technology."
Not too long ago, printers counted only how many pages of each type were printed (monochrome or color). If a page had any color at all on it, it would register as a color page and its cost would be the same cost as any color page even though some of the pages might be mostly black and white.
But Hewlett-Packard's Edgeline printer has four meters, two more than do most of today's color printers. One is for "office color" which is a color page that doesn't have as much toner on it because it is merely a draft. A second meter counts "professional color" which is a color page with more ink on it. Then there's a monochrome meter that counts pages with no color at all on them. And a fourth meter counts "color accent" pages with just a touch of color on them. This last one is particularly useful to law firms that do "redlining." Previously, every time someone printed a redlined page, it was considered color, and that could cost 15-20 cents a page for a black-and-white document with some red lines on it.
And so, by using technology, vendors are able to bill customers who pay per use more appropriately to the type of document they are producing.
For example, I know one law firm that has a practice of printing their color logo on every page. In the past, they paid 15 cents a page even though the pages were all black and white except for their logo. Now they are billed for black-and-white pages and save a ton of money.
We know of another firm that has had its Edgeline machine for just 2-1/2 months and has saved $1,000 on color pages. Now that's the sort of savings I'm sure any law firm wouldn't mind having.
And so the message here is that by getting the right printer for your usage -- and by using a vendor who is willing to tailor a billing methodology that really is appropriate for that particular organization -- a company can control and save costs.
And you can print that!
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About Us |
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Advantage Enterprises delivers advisory and managed print services, primarily to Am Law 100 law firms so they can focus on their highest and best purpose of billing their time and growing their client base.
For over 20 years, Advantage's environmentally green
lifecycle management programs have increased productivity
of printing and imaging fleets and cut costs while
saving the environment.
To learn more about what gives the top law firms their
competitive edge, please visit our Web site at www.advtg.com
or e-mail us at
marketing@advtg.com. |
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Matt Kesner is Chief Technology Officer at Fenwick & West LLP headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. Recently he took a few minutes to chat about his 60-day evaluation of the Hewlett-Packard Model 8050 color Edgeline multi-function printer and how he anticipates that 
it will help him manage color costs.
"When we print to our central copier/multi-function printer, it is practically impossible to find our copies in the output bin. It seems we always end up with someone else's copies or lose our own. Do you have any suggestions in sorting this out?"
When you have several people all printing to a central copier or printer, sometimes copies can be lost. We've all gone to the copier to find our job missing and always have to spend a few minutes sorting through the mess of paper to find our job. Sometimes abandoned copies stack up, just adding to the confusion.
