Xerox thinks it has hit on something big to breathe life into the ailing market for high-volume office printers: It’s called colour.
After years of research, Xerox will release the first in a new series of large machines this month that it claims will change the economics of printing large volumes of colour documents at offices. Unlike traditional laser printers that use cartridges of powdery, sometimes messy toner, the revamped products rely on hunks of ink that remain solid at room temperature and melt when heated.
Xerox, based in Norwalk, bills the solid ink technology, which lets it create machines with fewer parts, as the biggest shift in the industry since it sold the first laser printer in 1977.
“This is something they have been working on for forever and a day,” said Brian Bissett, the editor of the MFP Report, a publication about office printers and copiers. “It does have the potential to be fairly important.” Traditionally, printer makers have charged big corporate customers a per-page fee for printing services: up to 8 cents a page for a colour document and less than 2 cents a page for black-and-white.
Xerox and its main competitors, Canon and Ricoh, typically bill customers for a colour page if there is any pigment on it, whether it’s a full-colour replica of a slide from a presentation or a page that just has a colourful company logo and mostly black text. Because of the higher cost, only about 15 percent of the more than two trillion documents printed every year in offices worldwide use colour.
“This isn’t because people don’t like colour but because there have been lots of barriers to colour,” said Ursula M Burns, the president of Xerox. “The last barrier is that it’s expensive.”
With its new ColorQube solid ink systems, Xerox says it can pull the average cost of colour documents down to about 3 cents a page. A portion of the price break comes from better tracking of how much colour is used on a page. But the principal breakthrough with the solid ink technology stems from the overall simplicity of the machine’s innards. Solid ink machines need about one-third as many parts as laser printers, which require various mechanisms to fuse toner onto paper that must be replaced over time, adding materials and services costs.
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