Color or Monochrome?
Over the last few years, the market for color has exploded. The price of color copiers has come down—offering more product choices, lower acquisition and “click costs,” greater speed, and quality that competes with copy/print shops.
Today’s copiers and printers also offer control over color privileges, greatly enhancing your ability to enforce cost control. And, because dealers are under pressure to sell color networked products, you can often negotiate aggressive “per click” charges into your service agreement.
To decide if color is the right choice for you, try and project your color output needs over the next few years. Remember to include color output from printers, as well as outsourced jobs and existing color copier products. Very often there is an opportunity to save money by retiring printers or migrating printer color output to a larger multi-functional product since printer cost per color page output is generally higher. Of course, you need to consider many issues when you balance a distributed vs. centralized approach to output as well as copier vs. printer based MFPs.
While color is cheaper than it was, it isn’t free. If your color volume is low and/or you work in an office environment where controlling color output costs is difficult, or your strategy for output calls for a monochrome “work horse” to drive your costs as low as possible, you should focus on monochrome devices.
Keep in mind that some color MFPs today also offer color scanning capabilities and color fax options, though these capabilities will come with higher price tags.
Once you have a sense of your volume needs and how much of that is color or monochrome, you can begin to decide what types of devices can serve that need.