Xerox slashes cost of colour printing

Colour prints cost no more than black-and-white with ColorQube 9200 series

Xerox has launched in the UK its ColorQube printers, which aim to make colour documents as affordable as black-and-white printing for enterprise customers, as well as reducing waste and cutting the volume of consumables that IT departments have to store.

Shipping to European resellers now, the ColorQube 9200 range brings Xerox’s solid ink printing technology into a departmental multi-function printer (MFP) for the first time.

The three models are similar in purchase price to comparable laser printers, but reduce waste by up to 90 per cent and the cost of printing in colour by 50 per cent, according to the firm.

"We’re making colour more affordable, more easy to use, and with less impact on the environment. We believe this will significantly change the shape of printing in the office for years to come," said Mark Boyt, European Office Product marketing manager at Xerox.

According to Boyt, only 15 per cent of pages printed are currently in colour, largely due to reasons of cost. Charges for colour pages can be ten times that for black-and-white, so companies naturally clamp down on colour prints.

"But colour can bring value to a document, so we’re taking the cost of colour out of the equation and making it the same as for black-and-white," he claimed.

Solid ink printing is nothing new – Xerox acquired it from Tektronix in 2000 – but the technology has been scaled up to support A3 prints and combined with Xerox’s MFP functionality to meet enterprise demands.

The technology uses solid inks that are melted and sprayed onto the page as droplets, in a manner not dissimilar from inkjet printing. But because the inks are solid at room temperature, they can be supplied in blocks that are simply dropped into the printer, rather than being contained in a cartridge.

"People can easily refill the machine themselves – they don’t have to call an engineer because there are no cartridges to be changed," said Boyt.