Our office needs a new copier/printer and conventional wisdom seems to be
that you must get a service agreement or lease or you'll end up with lots
of problems, but I wonder if that is really the case?

The office prints or copies about 4-5000 pages a month (=about 150 a day)
and an A4 copier that meets this volume can be had for as little as £250
with a one-year onsite warranty. I can't help feeling that this should be
enough without having to go for a fullblown service agreement, has anyone
got experience of this?

Given that lease+service agreements seem to cost hundreds per quarter my
feeling is that it would be cheaper to just buy a machine (and maybe pay
another £100 to extend the onsite warranty to 3 years), and then simply
chuck the copier if it becomes unmanageble and get another. But the office
manager is scared that they may get stuck with problems that a warranty
wouldn't address (maybe paper jams etc?) and have to pay lots of ad hoc
servicing bills. Am I being too naive about the tribulations of copiers?
I should say that I normally work from home so I'm not the person who has
to deal with demonic office equipment when it malfunctions!

Gordon Freeman wrote:
Our office needs a new copier/printer and conventional wisdom seems to be
that you must get a service agreement or lease or you'll end up with lots
of problems, but I wonder if that is really the case?

The office prints or copies about 4-5000 pages a month (=about 150 a day)
and an A4 copier that meets this volume can be had for as little as £250
with a one-year onsite warranty. I can't help feeling that this should be
enough without having to go for a fullblown service agreement, has anyone
got experience of this?

Given that lease+service agreements seem to cost hundreds per quarter my
feeling is that it would be cheaper to just buy a machine (and maybe pay
another £100 to extend the onsite warranty to 3 years), and then simply
chuck the copier if it becomes unmanageble and get another. But the office
manager is scared that they may get stuck with problems that a warranty
wouldn't address (maybe paper jams etc?) and have to pay lots of ad hoc
servicing bills. Am I being too naive about the tribulations of copiers?
I should say that I normally work from home so I'm not the person who has
to deal with demonic office equipment when it malfunctions!

Beware the trick some of the service people use. They sometimes put the
microswitch that counts copy numbers a little way to one side, so it
records every copy twice. Of course no-one has any real idea how many
copies have been done so you end up paying for twice as many service visits.

I have abandoned copiers and now use an A3 scanner that is set to print
automatically via a laser printer. This solution might not be suitable
if there are a lot of users, some of whom will be stupid.

Bill

On Sat, 31 Jan 2015 01:02:40 +0000 (UTC) Gordon Freeman wrote :
Our office needs a new copier/printer and conventional wisdom seems to be
that you must get a service agreement or lease or you'll end up with lots
of problems, but I wonder if that is really the case?

The office prints or copies about 4-5000 pages a month (=about 150 a day)
and an A4 copier that meets this volume can be had for as little as £250
with a one-year onsite warranty. I can't help feeling that this should be
enough without having to go for a fullblown service agreement, has anyone
got experience of this?

Given that lease+service agreements seem to cost hundreds per quarter my
feeling is that it would be cheaper to just buy a machine (and maybe pay
another £100 to extend the onsite warranty to 3 years), and then simply
chuck the copier if it becomes unmanageble and get another. But the office
manager is scared that they may get stuck with problems that a warranty
wouldn't address (maybe paper jams etc?) and have to pay lots of ad hoc
servicing bills. Am I being too naive about the tribulations of copiers?
I should say that I normally work from home so I'm not the person who has
to deal with demonic office equipment when it malfunctions!

For my last years in UK I bought a Canon GP225 copy printer with six bins
and PC interface, cost £4600 in 1999 and it was printing your sort of
volume. When I started my research leasing seemed a good deal, then I found
that the buy price for these commercial copiers is about 50% of list, thus
enabling leasing companies to offer deals that look really good. Even then
it was a lot of money for a one person business to spend, but was balanced
by dirt cheap running expenses and the convenience of multiple bins (each of
our leaflets was printed on different colour stock). toner cartridges £30
IIRC for about 8,000 sides. As I had very good experience with the engineer
who had maintained my previous copiers, I signed up with them for contract
maintenance something like £40pcm.

So over the eight years I had it (it was still running fine when I emigrated
but I gave it to the guy in the next office), assuming 4,000 sides a month,
£4600 + 96x£40 + 48 x £30 = £9880, or about 2.5p per side all in. That was
mono of course, colour wasn't an option back then.

All in it was one of my best purchases: buying a machine with a rated
workload of something like 25K sides pcm and using it for a fraction of this
meant there was very little trouble. A lot of problems in large offices are
down to abuse - paper clips going where they shouldn't, damp paper, paper
not fanned out before being put in tray etc.

--
Tony Bryer, Greentram: 'Software to build on',
Melbourne, Australia www.greentram.com

On 31/01/15 01:02, Gordon Freeman wrote:
Our office needs a new copier/printer and conventional wisdom seems to be
that you must get a service agreement or lease or you'll end up with lots
of problems, but I wonder if that is really the case?

The office prints or copies about 4-5000 pages a month (=about 150 a day)
and an A4 copier that meets this volume can be had for as little as £250
with a one-year onsite warranty. I can't help feeling that this should be
enough without having to go for a fullblown service agreement, has anyone
got experience of this?

Given that lease+service agreements seem to cost hundreds per quarter my
feeling is that it would be cheaper to just buy a machine (and maybe pay
another £100 to extend the onsite warranty to 3 years), and then simply
chuck the copier if it becomes unmanageble and get another. But the office
manager is scared that they may get stuck with problems that a warranty
wouldn't address (maybe paper jams etc?) and have to pay lots of ad hoc
servicing bills. Am I being too naive about the tribulations of copiers?
I should say that I normally work from home so I'm not the person who has
to deal with demonic office equipment when it malfunctions!


Perhaps 2 cheap copiers could be better for that volume?

If one breaks you have the other. I'd do a cost anaylsis of:

Big machine with servicing

vs

2 cheap machines, no servicing and expect to replace every 2 years.

You also have to factor in:

Staff time - if the cheap machine is a slow and temperamental PoS, you
will waste a lot of several people's time.

Servicing: Even with a very high end contract like we had at a London
Uni, and a servicing engineer who stored some common parts on site (we
gave him a cupboard because we had 8 machines) and who was usually in
the area as he was dedicated to us and several other outfits in South
Ken, you can still be waiting 4 hours with a broken machine.

In reality for a small office with no leverage, you'll be lucky if you
see the guy the same day.

On 31/01/15 07:04, Tony Bryer wrote:

For my last years in UK I bought a Canon GP225 copy printer with six bins
and PC interface, cost £4600 in 1999 and it was printing your sort of
volume. When I started my research leasing seemed a good deal, then I found
that the buy price for these commercial copiers is about 50% of list, thus
enabling leasing companies to offer deals that look really good. Even then
it was a lot of money for a one person business to spend, but was balanced
by dirt cheap running expenses and the convenience of multiple bins (each of
our leaflets was printed on different colour stock). toner cartridges £30
IIRC for about 8,000 sides. As I had very good experience with the engineer
who had maintained my previous copiers, I signed up with them for contract
maintenance something like £40pcm.

I will recommend the Canon iR series.

We trialled a GP - the mechanics seemed good, but one of our students
broke the imaging engine (the software part) when he (with our blessing
as we were testing the thing) ran a Postscript program to generate and
print PI to 1 million dec places.

It got stuck and because it cached the job to disk, we were unable to
stop the job - even with a power cycle. The cancel job option did not
reset the imaging engine - it seemed to want to let that complete but
simply not run the output to the printing engine (seemed a bit dumb).

I tried the "format disk" option I found in a sub menu that did not
prompt for the admin PIN we had set. It did a little more formatting
than I expected for a front panel easy to access command! Needed an
engineer to re-load the software. It was at that point Canon said
perhaps an iR series would be better for us...

They were right - we had very little trouble with those and they were
absolutely hammered. And the PI program did not break them...

"Bill Wright" wrote in message ...

Beware the trick some of the service people use. They sometimes put the microswitch
that counts copy numbers a little way to one side, so it records every copy twice. Of
course no-one has any real idea how many copies have been done so you end up paying for
twice as many service visits.

I would have thought your invoices for copy paper would have given quite
a good idea. Unless of course paper manufacturers and suppliers are
all in league with leasing companies and only put half as many sheets
in a bundle as is printed on the label.


michael adams

....

On 31/01/15 10:51, michael adams wrote:
"Bill Wright" wrote in message ...

Beware the trick some of the service people use. They sometimes put the microswitch
that counts copy numbers a little way to one side, so it records every copy twice. Of
course no-one has any real idea how many copies have been done so you end up paying for
twice as many service visits.

Trivial to check though - print 10 sheet sand see what the counter does.

Also as this detector is part of the main control loop, buggering it up
to dual count will almost certainly break the machine which will think
its jammed or something.



I would have thought your invoices for copy paper would have given quite
a good idea. Unless of course paper manufacturers and suppliers are
all in league with leasing companies and only put half as many sheets
in a bundle as is printed on the label.


michael adams

...

Tim Watts wrote:

In reality for a small office with no leverage, you'll be lucky if you
see the guy the same day.

I second the above poster's idea of two cheap machines. I ran a small
1.5 - 2 person business for many years and having two printers was
often a lifesaver. In our case they were actually two different
printers, a B&W Laser workhorse and a colour inkjet but the inkjet's
ability to print B&W resonably effectively when the Laser's toner had
run out or I was having serious issues with the Window's drivers often
saved much tearing of hair.

--
Chris Green
·

On Sat, 31 Jan 2015 18:04:01 +1100, Tony Bryer
wrote:

A lot of problems in large offices are
down to abuse - ... paper not fanned out before being put in tray etc.

I don't remember the last time I had a problem with paper static, must
be well over 10 years. It's certainly a long time since I fanned out
paper before loading it.

In article ,
Tim Watts writes:
I will recommend the Canon iR series.

We trialled a GP - the mechanics seemed good, but one of our students
broke the imaging engine (the software part) when he (with our blessing
as we were testing the thing) ran a Postscript program to generate and
print PI to 1 million dec places.

It got stuck and because it cached the job to disk, we were unable to
stop the job - even with a power cycle. The cancel job option did not
reset the imaging engine - it seemed to want to let that complete but
simply not run the output to the printing engine (seemed a bit dumb).

When we first got a postscript printer at work in the mid 1980's,
I sent it a program to calculate a mandelbrot image. It took me
many goes, because I hadn't realised it would take hours, and other
people seeing this tiny 200 byte job stuck on the printer kept turning
it off and on again. Eventually I got my printout by leaving it
running overnight.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

On Sat, 31 Jan 2015 01:02:40 +0000 (UTC), Gordon Freeman
wrote:


The office prints or copies about 4-5000 pages a month (=about 150 a day)
and an A4 copier that meets this volume can be had for as little as £250
with a one-year onsite warranty. I can't help feeling that this should be
enough without having to go for a fullblown service agreement, has anyone
got experience of this?


Yes but only because I was asked to check costs, I am not involved
with running it other than as one of 22 users. Ours is a konica
minolta 280 A3 networked printer on a leasing agreement (. We print
about 73k Black and 17k colour per quarter (often only the logo is the
coloured bit). The £1000/qtr lease covers call outs and toner but I
think other parts have to be paid for. We have an allowance of 17k
black and 10k colour/qtr and the monthly maintenance and toner splits
60:40 black to colour or vice versa.

Anyway it looks like the black costs run out about 1/10 penny and
colour over 6 pence.

We would be far better off with a black A4 laser for 90% of out work
and dumping the service agreement.

I have yet to check whether the counter counts 2 for an A3 copy.

AJH

"Tim Watts" wrote in message
...
On 31/01/15 10:51, michael adams wrote:
"Bill Wright" wrote in message
...

Beware the trick some of the service people use. They sometimes put the microswitch
that counts copy numbers a little way to one side, so it records every copy twice. Of
course no-one has any real idea how many copies have been done so you end up paying
for
twice as many service visits.

Trivial to check though - print 10 sheet sand


Or even one, come to think of it. So much for checking invoices.

Oops!



michael adams

....




see what the counter does.

Also as this detector is part of the main control loop, buggering it up to dual count
will almost certainly break the machine which will think its jammed or something.



I would have thought your invoices for copy paper would have given quite
a good idea. Unless of course paper manufacturers and suppliers are
all in league with leasing companies and only put half as many sheets
in a bundle as is printed on the label.


michael adams

...

michael adams wrote:
"Bill Wright" wrote in message ...

Beware the trick some of the service people use. They sometimes put the microswitch
that counts copy numbers a little way to one side, so it records every copy twice. Of
course no-one has any real idea how many copies have been done so you end up paying for
twice as many service visits.

I would have thought your invoices for copy paper would have given quite
a good idea.

Not when the paper is used for many different purposes.

Bill

Tim Watts wrote:
On 31/01/15 10:51, michael adams wrote:
"Bill Wright" wrote in message
...

Beware the trick some of the service people use. They sometimes put
the microswitch
that counts copy numbers a little way to one side, so it records
every copy twice. Of
course no-one has any real idea how many copies have been done so you
end up paying for
twice as many service visits.

Trivial to check though - print 10 sheet sand see what the counter does.

Also as this detector is part of the main control loop, buggering it up
to dual count will almost certainly break the machine which will think
its jammed or something.

In my case it didn't bugger the machine up, and I found at what was
happening because I was idly watching the counter one day. At the time I
had a contract that took me into various schools across the region, and
I noticed that the same copier firm was in a lot of them, so I started
talking to the secretaries and getting them to check, and sure enough
they had the same thing. A total scam. I should mention this was quite a
long time ago. The copier firm, incidentally, disappeared a few years later.

Bill

Peter Johnson wrote:
On Sat, 31 Jan 2015 18:04:01 +1100, Tony Bryer
wrote:

A lot of problems in large offices are
down to abuse - ... paper not fanned out before being put in tray etc.

I don't remember the last time I had a problem with paper static, must
be well over 10 years. It's certainly a long time since I fanned out
paper before loading it.

Some printers tell you not to do this.

--
Chris Green
·

On Sat, 31 Jan 2015 11:37:52 +0000, Tim Watts
wrote:

On 31/01/15 10:51, michael adams wrote:
"Bill Wright" wrote in message ...

Beware the trick some of the service people use. They sometimes put the microswitch
that counts copy numbers a little way to one side, so it records every copy twice. Of
course no-one has any real idea how many copies have been done so you end up paying for
twice as many service visits.

Trivial to check though - print 10 sheet sand see what the counter does.

Also as this detector is part of the main control loop, buggering it up
to dual count will almost certainly break the machine which will think
its jammed or something.



I would have thought your invoices for copy paper would have given quite
a good idea. Unless of course paper manufacturers and suppliers are
all in league with leasing companies and only put half as many sheets
in a bundle as is printed on the label.


michael adams

...



That might explain this:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ream

--

Graham.

%Profound_observation%

On 31/01/15 21:02, Gordon Freeman wrote:
Bill Wright wrote:

Beware the trick some of the service people use. They sometimes put the
microswitch that counts copy numbers a little way to one side, so it
records every copy twice.

Yes, I've discovered this site http://www.faircontracts.co.uk/blog/
which warns of this, also that sometimes the colour meters register a copy
for each of the 4 toners thus quadrupling the count, and sometimes mono
copies are counted as colour or A4 landscape as A3 (which counts as two
copies under our present lease agreement). I am intending to check our
machine to see if one copy registers as one or not since I'm very
suspicious about the claimed colour copy volume.

As for what another poster said about simply checking how much paper you've
bought, this isn't necessarily a good guide since most machines can do
automatic two-sided copying so you could genuinely be doing up to twice the
number of copies as sheets of paper you buy.


To meter by A4 "impressions" makes reasonable sense and I have seen this
- the copier is doing proportionality more work.

But I have never heard of the 4 colours tripping a count each.

On 31/01/2015 16:11, wrote:
Peter Johnson wrote:
On Sat, 31 Jan 2015 18:04:01 +1100, Tony Bryer
wrote:

A lot of problems in large offices are
down to abuse - ... paper not fanned out before being put in tray etc.

I don't remember the last time I had a problem with paper static, must
be well over 10 years. It's certainly a long time since I fanned out
paper before loading it.

Some printers tell you not to do this.

+1

--
Rod

On 31/01/2015 10:51, michael adams wrote:
I would have thought your invoices for copy paper would have given quite
a good idea. Unless of course paper manufacturers and suppliers are
all in league with leasing companies and only put half as many sheets
in a bundle as is printed on the label.

Or if the contract includes all supplies, including the paper.

--
Rod

wrote:
Tim Watts wrote:
In reality for a small office with no leverage, you'll be lucky if you
see the guy the same day.

I second the above poster's idea of two cheap machines. I ran a small
1.5 - 2 person business for many years and having two printers was
often a lifesaver. In our case they were actually two different
printers, a B&W Laser workhorse and a colour inkjet but the inkjet's
ability to print B&W resonably effectively when the Laser's toner had
run out or I was having serious issues with the Window's drivers often
saved much tearing of hair.


Yes,we have an HP Laserjet and an A3 Canon, and when one is on strike we
can use the other.

Bill