Are Free Printers Really Free
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Are Free Printers Really Free?
Working for a distributor of printers and copiers, I have seen an interesting trend. More and more manufacturer’s are “giving away” printers. The most obvious example of these giveaways are Dell and Xerox. One has to wonder, what’s in it for the manufacturer? After all, do you see Apple giving away Ipods or Martin giving away Guitars?
To keep this simple, the answer is giving away printers makes money. Actually it makes A LOT of money for the manufacturer. Lets break this down so you can see what happens here.
You buy a $6,500 Dell server and then you get a “Free Printer” or two for your loyal business. This can be an awesome thing, but because companies are often unaware of how to really evaluate costs, or think it is such a small item, they don’t check what they are doing.
In the Dell example here, let’s say company XYZ gets 3 of these printers (probably the 1720N’s) and say they print 2,500 pages per month… A Dell 1700/1720 cartridge runs most folks about $90. So, you are paying about 1.8 cents per page. ($90/5000pages).
2,500 X $.018(cost per print) X 3 (# of units) X 36 (3 years) = $4,860 in toner costs…
WOW! A free printer in this example is costing $5,000!
Let’s look at an alternative to this.
You could BUY a Kyocera 1030 networked for about $500. Pretty much the same specs.
2,500 X .008 (cost per print) X 3 X 36 = $2,160 + $1,500 for the units…
Total spent = $3,660 compared to $4,860 for the “FREE” printers.
What’s the solution? Basically, the easiest is to make sure you print less than 1500 pages per month on the “FREE” printer, or it will make more sense to buy new printers instead. If you stay under the 1,500 pages, you can beat the manufacturer at their own game!
Jesse Harwell is the owner of two web sites, http://www.laserprintercenter.com and http://www.dotmatrixprinters.info He has been in the printing industry for 10 years and works with small offices to large corporate accounts. He can be reached through his web sites for more information.