[NA] Print job costs

Let'sgoflying!

Let'sgoflying!

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Dave Taylor
My biz uses a single, standard 8&1/2"x11"one-sided white page with very simple text and lines (all black ink), totaling about 200 pages/mo.
The print company is quoting $0.13/page if I buy 5000.
I was wondering if I wouldn't be ahead if I bought a cheap disposable printer, copy paper & ink and hammer away at the task in-house instead of contracting it out.

Anyone faced with this decision?
Printer $250
Paper 20# 92brt 10 reams $55
laser toner $15
 
Take one of each and put them side by side under some good and fairly intense light and then evaluate which looks better........hint.....it won't be inkjet or laser.....
 
Depends on the purpose of the documents. If it's something for customers or advertising for future business then quality is to be considered as it represents the company. If it's inner office memos or single use pages for meetings that will hit the round file afterwards then not so much ...
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
laser toner $15
Click to expand...
If the document is going to be exposed to any sort of heat (e.g. stored in vehicle parked in the sun) or age, don't go cheap on the laser lest ye don't mind pages stuck together.
 
mandm said:
For 200 pages, I would just buy a brother laser printer and print at home. Think about fuel and time wasted of driving somewhere.
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Want to make sure you saw it’s 200 / mo.

Fuel & driving; I missed that (??)
 
asicer said:
If the document is going to be exposed to any sort of heat (e.g. stored in vehicle parked in the sun) or age, don't go cheap on the laser lest ye don't mind pages stuck together.
Click to expand...

the cheap laser has proven up, in other documents here
 
Daleandee said:
Depends on the purpose of the documents. If it's something for customers or advertising for future business then quality is to be considered as it represents the company. If it's inner office memos or single use pages for meetings that will hit the round file afterwards then not so much ...
Click to expand...

definitely inner office
But you didn’t say which way to go, for either.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
My biz uses a single, standard 8&1/2"x11"one-sided white page with very simple text and lines (all black ink), totaling about 200 pages/mo.
The print company is quoting $0.13/page if I buy 5000.
I was wondering if I wouldn't be ahead if I bought a cheap disposable printer, copy paper & ink and hammer away at the task in-house instead of contracting it out.

Anyone faced with this decision?
Printer $250
Paper 20# 92brt 10 reams $55
laser toner $15
Click to expand...

.13/pg sounds like about what we pay for our duplex color printer that prints up to 11x17 in the big city. But we have to buy our own paper.

$250 sounds high for a printer. At the beginning of the pandemic I bought a refurbed Brother printer that does 8 1/2 x 11 B&W duplex for about $100. Maybe with 3 years inflation it is more now.

$15 for toner sounds really low though. And you don't say how many pages that will print.

One thing I learned from my experience is the 'starter' toner that comes with the printer doesn't print that many pages, so you are buying your first toner sooner than you would expect.

There's also probably tax and cash flow considerations in the two different solutions, but that may be way down in the noise for the amount you're talking about.

I think your intuition is probably right; bring it in house. You may want to do some sensitivity analysis though. Calculate for 150 and 250 pp/mon and see if it is still the same answer.

Good luck.
 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01824JTWK/
Brother HL-L6200DW, $300
Comes with starter toner cartridge good for approx 3000 pages. Drum included is good for 30,000 pages.

Replacement toner, TN880, with 12,000 yield ~ $120 for about 1.0 cent per page.
Replacement drum, DR820, with 30,000 yield ~ $125 for about 0.4 cents per page

Great printer. I get no kickbacks so buy it or not no difference. I never heard anybody say they didn't like it after they got it up and running. If you do get this, do not get cheap 3rd party toner. Twice I have seen those damage the printer.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
definitely inner office
But you didn’t say which way to go, for either.
Click to expand...

I was saying that it would depend on the quality you desired for a given application. As for me I'd want to put the better copies out to clients & customers ...
 
Sac Arrow said:
That sounds like a job for a Mimeograph.

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The church has an older hand crank model in the storage room. They used to say it made a "lickety-whop" sound as it cranked out copies ... :)
 
It's probably cheaper to hire it out, especially if you figure in labor cost and PITA factor, including your own. Get quotes from different places, including delivery or shipping.

Outsourced - you electronically send them the doc, it shows up at your door, and they either invoice you or charge your cc, your choice.
In house - you electronically create the doc, then someone babysits the process of printing it, and along the way someone has to change toner, order paper, figure out cost,
sort out a way to reduce the chances of someone printing their church fliers with your printer, etc.

There's a million different theories on running businesses, and I'm not an expert. My thinking has been, though, that the people you hire should be primarily focused on customer care and sales, and in production and QA, for a small business. Hire out the things that aren't in those verticals, like accounting, HR/payroll, cleaning, because you're not going to have expertise and efficiency of scale in any of those side things, and you want your staff to be focused on what your company IS an expert in. Too many times an easy project to save money just becomes a fun time suck that's drawing time away from the bottom line. Just my 2 cents.
 
Low and laser printer, or better yet an Epson Ecotank multifunction. We picked up an Ecotank 3850 that prints double sided in color; it also has an auto feed scanner that will copy or scan to a PDF file on your computer. The ink it comes with should be good for thousands of pages, and refill ink is cheap. We’re very happy with it, and I’ve worn out several printers so I’m kind of picky.

I’d recommend avoiding HP like the plague.
 
If OP is interested in the ever recurring ink vs laser thread, there are already plenty of that on the site.
 
Buying 5,000 copies is tiny volume, not the sort of volume that you need a print man for. They are using a laser printer for this job. They're not setting up a press for it. If you want 500,000 copies, sure, go to a man with a press.

200 pages a month is not high volume. That is like 10 pages per business day which would be a very light duty for any laser printer (consumer or business).

As to the time savings argument folks brought up - that is freaking ridiculous. A good laser printer can spit out your 200 pages without being reloaded with a single click. You'd spend by far more time sending a job to a commercial printer and then working out the quote/delivery/etc details.

Source: I spent about ten years working at a print company watching how they did things. A job as small as yours would just be sent to a laser printer. Might as well send it to your own laser printer vs. theirs.
 
Back about 18 years ago, I spent a year or so working the IBM assembly line building the InfoPrint 4100. Hell of a machine. Took up about a garage worth of space and printed at a rate of 20 pages per second.
IBM-InfoPrint-4100.jpg

Can probably find them for free in the basement of failing banks (they used them to print statements). I'd suggest one for each exam room. You can hire me full time to support them.
 
Daleandee said:
The church has an older hand crank model in the storage room. They used to say it made a "lickety-whop" sound as it cranked out copies ... :)
Click to expand...

Even in the late '80's, our unit (1st CAV Battalion HQ/S3) used manual typewriters and mimeographs to type and print op orders in the field. It was actually pretty effective. When we finally got our first computer with a dot matrix printer (running DOS Word Perfect) we lugged that around in the M557 and powered it with the generator. We still needed the mimeograph because the Xerox machine was too large and cumbersome to transport in a tracked armored personnel carrier.
 
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