Choosing a Copier / Printer for a Small Business
In this article, we will go through the decision-making process of a start-up company Techify. Their decision-making process when purchasing a copier should help you in shortlisting a copier for your business needs as well. Since Techify is a start-up company, their printing needs aren’t too demanding – just a couple of printouts every week for internal purposes. When Techify didn’t have a printer of their own, the employees had to go to a stationery store to get printouts, which was a waste of time and a loss in productivity. Hence, it made sense to just get their own copier.
After a little deliberation, they decided to go with the ‘Xerox DocuCentre-V C2265’. But the question is, how did they decide on this? There are a few points which need to be considered before anything else while buying a printer/copier.
First, you need to ask yourself how many pages would your business need printed on a monthly basis? How often are you going to use the copier? In Techify’s case, they needed the copier to print out not more than a couple of pages each day, if that. So their monthly usage was pretty low.
The second thing is the speed. How fast do you need those copies? Speed and volume needed usually go hand-in-hand. If a business needs several copies on a daily basis, chances are it wants those copies quickly as well. Now, the C2265’s speed is 20 pages per minute (ppm). Given that, this is pretty good for Techify. It would not have taken them more than 3-5 minutes for all their daily printouts, even considering the printing boot time. This is obviously a huge saving when compared to going to a stationary shop to get things printed! Thirdly, do you need colour printing? Inkjet copiers usually produce the best quality colour printouts, but Techify didn’t really need very high-quality coloured copies. Sure, having a colour copier was great, but it was for printing things like charts and graphs. Nothing fancy at all. Additionally, you’d want an inkjet if your business needs to print on special material, like photos. If not, a laser or LED copier would do the job, and they’re faster than an inkjet variety.
Also, one thing to consider is that while LED and Laser copiers are similar, an LED copier has fewer moving parts, and therefore is generally less prone to damage.
After these three basic criteria, it’s important to consider that you need a certain minimum level of resolution quality as well. The measurement for that is dots per inch (dpi), and the higher this number, the better the print out quality. C2265 provides an output of 1200 X 2400 dpi, which is a pretty solid number. A resolution of 1200 dpi is good enough for even an average photographer!
Given these parameters, the DocuCentre-V C2265 fit the bill quite well for Techify’s purposes. What’s more, the C2265 is a multi-function device, which means it can scan and mail soft copies of the printouts as well. All this at a good speed of 55 ppm, which is more than sufficient for Techify’s needs.
There are also other things that you might want your copier to have. The C2265 has several of these ‘good-to-have’ features. For example
- It operates at low noise levels because it uses natural convection rather than having more cooling fans
- It provides the option of adding an IC (Integrated Circuit) card reader for authenticating usage
- It has the option of providing a ‘Simple Copy’ UI, which means a minimal, uncluttered UI with only the essential settings, making it easy-to-use
- It supports printing from any machine on demand – meaning one can login to any device, and print a job stored on the copier
- It is environment friendly & energy efficient
Here’s a simple flowchart which takes the essence of our decision-making process, and it can be used as a quick filter of sorts, for shortlisting a copier. Of course, you can add a few of your own parameters towards the end, like whether you need a multi-function copier or not. This should simplify your decision greatly!
