Print quality is a biggie, and so is cost, but I don’t think it’s as simple as a straight quality/cost tradeoff. Plain carbon with no polymers to help it stick to the paper will probably smudge, fade over time, and dirty your hands and other surfaces it comes into contact with. More ominously, it would also allow many more particles to become airborne, and pose serious health risks on par with asbestos and smoke.
There are probably many other factors, like probably increased maintenance/cleanup/failure-rate of the printer’s various mechanisms because of the buildup of toner particles.
The difficulty with line printers is that they use inked ribbons, which are a very price poor way of distributing ink.
Premium priced toner in domestic quantities is about 2c a page, down to 1c for higher end office machines, but as per a parallel thread, we know that the markup on those is both huge, and partly subsidises the cost of the printer. In industrial quantities the price is ridiculously cheaper. A quick Google throws up a toner cartridges (well bottles would be a better term) for a Xerox Docuprint 128 series, at $170 for three 7 pound bottles, with a yield of 220,000 pages. And this is original, not third party compatible toner. I doubt there is any print technology that can come even close to this.
If you want to investigate the reality of producing books in a range of quantities and qualities, a really good place to start is Lulu who do anything from one offs thorugh to multiple thousand impressions, and use these huge multi hundred thousand dollar Xerox machines for some of their work. There is a price calculator app one can fiddle with to see the effect of changes to the number of impressions and the number of pages, and the cost of binding. As a base point, a 300 page paperback, with a run of 1000, will cost $6.83 each complete. A run of 100 and they cost $8.40 each. It is almost certain that the 100 off run will be printed on a laser printer, and very likely the 1000 off would be too, although the breakpoint to offset printing kicks in somewhere here.
I’m not really sure what your suggesting here. Or I think I know, but it sounds like it’s way out of the realm of GQ
And this is where we loop back to telling you what you seem to get told in a lot of threads. You just don’t seem to understand how real world business works. It’s not like that. Also, it doesn’t help when you start making things up, like, why do you think it’s possible to suddenly make toner that’s 6 times cheaper then what’s out there? What if your magic cheap toner ends up causing cancer (I can make things up to)?
Also, have you done the research to find out how much of the cost of toner is actually tied up in the cartridge itself? I don’t know, but there’s probably a reason the manufacturer includes a UPS sticker to get the old one back so they can refill it.
Our operations center had two line printers. They only used uppercase print bands. Mixed case printing took too long and the bands broke quicker.
There’s also extra cost in buy & maintaining the burst machine that separates fan-fold paper and cuts off the sprocket hole tabs. It’s labor intensive and operations would only burst special reports. The rest were sent to our office and we had to bind them ourselves in computer binders.
I’m pretty sure our line printers were retired at least 10 to 12 years ago. Our office stopped printing stuff in operations around 1996 after buying our laser printer.
In all fairness to the OP, I think we do have a clear idea of what the price points are, and what the real cost of toner is. It really is already dirt cheap. Like I wrote above real prices of legit Xerox toner is about $18 a kilo. This isn’t just six times cheaper, it is a many more times cheaper than you buy it for in little cartridges for a domestic or small office printer.
The real point that answers the OP. There are printers that are not subsidised by the cost of toner. They tend to start at about $10,000, and are the ones that suck the $18 a kilo toner in large bottles.
We can look at a top end line printer. A quick look at the TallyGenicom web site finds a printer cartridge good for 250million characters for $160. So line ball with our 220,000 page toner for a Xerox 180 series laser printer. However, if we print one thousand characters on a page the running costs become close to equal. That isn’t a lot of characters. This isn’t a totally fair comparison, but the cross over point isn’t as massive distance apart as just looking at the rip off prices for domestic laser printers would suggest. The simple reality is that line printers have a niche where they are useful, but outside this niche laser printers dominate. Again the Lulu prices should make this clear. Toner just isn’t a noticeable component of the cost of printing when you get to these scales.
Maybe leave the last word to a line printer manufacturer: here
The people in suits are the ones running manufacturing firms. People do not create a product for a specific niche because a single person “believes it should be so.” Depending on how specific you get, some niches might literally be 0.001% of all customers in the market at large. Unless your product is sold at massive margin, such a niche is not a profitable segment to target individually.
If the only printers in the world cost $1,000 or more, the niche of customers who would want a cheaper printer would be very large. In our world the cheapest printers cost about $100 (that would have all the features a small business would want, obviously you can get much cheaper) and the lifetime cost of such a printer for an average business might only be $300 in all honesty.
So how many of those customers would be willing to buy a $400 printer with a lifetime cost of only $600? Keep in mind many businesses are moving away from printing and there is a focus on electronic documents. A lot of small businesses now print substantially less than they once did, many are even opting to not have fax machines.
The businesses that do print a ton, they’re already using high capacity, high speed laser printers that already offer very economical price on per-page printing.
which is precisely why I am now abandoning the discussion of line printers and switching gears to the discussion of those high speed, low cost toner printers over in the other thread. I am also interested in discussing the issue of why the printer has to be expensive and high speed to use the low cost toner.
Looking at the bigger picture, it seems that my basic original assumption that toner plays a big role in determining the cost of on-demand printing is simply wrong. Presumably whatever it is that is driving the costs over at lulu.com, toner isn’t it. Or, at least, shouldn’t be it given proper organization of the production process.
actually, before discussion is abandoned, another question. Don’t laser printers nowadays require pretty high quality and hence expensive paper? Is there be a price point at which paper quality is still high enough for making readable brochures but no longer appropriate for laser printing, in which case the line printer might make sense?
ASCII does not contain enough characters to typeset texts in most languages which use Latin characters. It isn’t even sufficient for typesetting English—it lacks some of the most commonly used punctuation, such as single and double quotation marks, the apostrophe, and the en and em dashes. Mind you, this is more an argument against using ASCII than against using line printers.
No, it has typewriter-style single and double tick marks, which bear only a passing resemblance to single and double quotation marks that typesetters have been using for centuries.
I’m not sure that “simply wrong” quite covers it, in all honesty. You seem to be coming from a position of fundamental ignorance of the processes of commercial printing. I can’t claim to know for sure all the ins and outs of lulu.com’s pricing structure, but having had a quick look around the site, its plain that the actual costs of planning, printing, trimming, collating, binding, packing and shipping the physical product don’t have any very obvious direct relationship with what they’re asking their customers to pay.
No.
Or rather, yes: some commercial digital presses are limited in the range of paper weight and quality they can print on, but not all are, and quite honestly, it’s difficult to imagine a business model that would succeed when the product is something that looks like the customer did it themselves on a typewriter using crap paper. Why pay for something you can do better yourself?
The problem is that people think one product (in this case, one type of printer) can address everyone’s needs. Such is not the case.
Line printers are still used for things like generation of factory picklists and invoices. They are blindingly fast and very cheap on a per-page basis. The noise matters little in a warehouse.
Laser printers are expensive, but very high-quality. Our POS system can’t scan barcodes created on dot-matrix printers, but work great with lasers. They’re faster than dot-matrix, and produce very clean, sharp originals.
Dot matrix printers are cheap. Dirt cheap. Unfortunately, a single color ink cartridge for my HP costs more than the printer cost. The ink bleeds on standard paper, and the printer takes seven ink cartridges.
Our thermal receipt printer is very quiet and fast, but quite expensive.
Each type of printer has its place. Each type has its advantages and disadvantages. You simply can’t argue that any given printer is always the best for everyone.
Each type of printer has its place. Each type has its advantages and disadvantages. You simply can’t argue that any given printer is always the best for everyone.
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well, nobody here is arguing anything of the sort. We are discussing ways to reduce per page printing costs in low end quality on demand printing jobs being carried out in industrial or quasi-industrial setting, such as at Lulu or OfficeMax.
I’m not sure that “simply wrong” quite covers it, in all honesty. You seem to be coming from a position of fundamental ignorance of the processes of commercial printing. I can’t claim to know for sure all the ins and outs of lulu.com’s pricing structure, but having had a quick look around the site, its plain that the actual costs of planning, printing, trimming, collating, binding, packing and shipping the physical product don’t have any very obvious direct relationship with what they’re asking their customers to pay.
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yeah, maybe. But then, why should we take claims of Lulu.com as gospel about the inherent price structure of on demand printing industry?
There is a certain fundamental, inescapable reality about the price of toner or of maintenance of a high performance laser printer. The toner and the printer will cost the same everywhere, no matter how well other processes are organized and what salaries are paid to employees, what taxes are paid to the government etc.
By contrast, the cost of trimming and packing might depend heavily on employee salaries, on the competence of the guy who designed the work processes, on the quality of the machines being used etc. Shipping costs for bulk packages might be so low as to be immaterial, and if all else fails the customer can drive up and pick it up at the plant. And then there are rent costs, corporate taxes and the CEO’s salary to worry about. None of which we are in position to know a lot about in the case of Lulu, and a lot of which could conceivably be optimized away. Whereas you don’t just administratively optimize away the price of toner, the price of laser printer or the speed of light in a vacuum.
No, exactly the opposite. A laser printer can turn out a readable image on decent quality newsprint, assuming the paper is heavy enough (and 18 lb. stock is pretty damn light.) In fact, one of my first innovations as an advertising newbie was to print client proofs on newsprint so they’d have a better idea of seeing how their ads would look in the newspaper.
If you want to take your questions to the next logical point, why not ask why we don’t go back to mimeograph machines, which are still being used in third-world countries (not to mention a few elementary schools.) Answer: the benefits of the newer technologies outweigh the relatively minor additional cost.
I saw my first laser printer in 1977. It was a high volume unit that printed pages too fast for me to see. The pages were just a blur. I checked and Ricoh has a laser printer that does over 330 feet a minute and an inkjet that does 722 feet a minute.