Colour Printing - are European small and medium businesses being offered the right solutions?
by Michael Buck
Europe is known for its' colour - frequently we associate colour with different countries, like national flags or sports teams. The importance of colour was particularly evident when the EU recently launched the new European Union flag; instead of a plain background and stars it is made up of a mix of all the colours from the member states' national flags.
In work too, colour is very important. Using colour is a more effective and efficient way to communicate. It captures an audience or reader's attention and adds visual emphasis and impact to presentations and reports. It also gives a very professional appearance and differentiates documents and a company's image from the competition.
It is interesting therefore to see that colour traditions are not yet fully integrated into the way we work. Despite colour being a part of our everyday lives, in the workplace we are still heavily reliant on black and white as a means of business communication. It is this trend that prompted HP to commission TNSofres to conduct an in-house colour printing survey. We wanted to gain an understanding of the inhibitors to colour printing in the office within SMBs - was it concerns with price, lack of awareness or the products themselves?
SMB Colour Printing Survey
The in-house colour printing survey examined the uptake of colour technology within European small and medium size businesses, including UK, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Poland and The Netherlands. It was conducted among department heads, manager or managing directors of businesses between 10 - 499 employees.
The survey revealed what we already believed to be true - that despite a clear demand for colour printing technology, many European offices do not have colour printers.
Most offices in fact would prefer to have colour printing facilities in-house. UK respondents are overwhelmingly in favour of being able to print material in colour, in particular promotional and sales material (21%) and business stationery (19%). Likewise in Sweden, where by far the greatest demand for colour printing was for presentations (60%) and reports and proposals (26%). Across all countries the top two categories for internal colour printing were business stationary and promotional and sales material.
This inclination towards colour printing is twinned with four distinct business drivers for in-house colour printing. The first is cost and time saving. Germany in particular considers this to be an important benefit. The second is the ability to undertake small print runs. Nearly a quarter of Swedish respondents feel this is the most significant advantage. Thirdly, the vast majority of the countries surveyed cite cheaper cost per page as another key reason for in-house colour printing. The final incentive is the potential for better print quality. In the UK this is rated as the second most important reason.
At the same time, the survey also tells us that this demand is not reflected in the types of printers we currently use. On the whole, black and white laser printers are the most prevalent type of print technology. In the UK 55% of those surveyed possessed a black and white laser printer, along with 81% (Netherlands), 76% (Sweden), 74% (France), 73% Germany and 60% (Italy). n addition, it appears that an incredible 82% of offices do not have a printer larger than A4.
Caroline Gaskin, Senior Research Analyst at TNSofres claims that this represents a dichotomy in the European Print landscape. "In the research we discovered a clear discrepancy between the desire within business to undertake colour printing in-house and the actual uptake of the colour printers themselves."
Colourful Alternatives
The options for SMBs are to either outsource colour printing or to introduce a colour printer to in-house. At present neither option is straightforward. Outsourcing can be expensive however, especially for smaller companies who do not undertake enormous print runs. Indeed, 37% of all respondents feel that it is cost is an issue. Given that a vast majority of material (70% of promotional and sales material for example) is currently being outsourced across Europe at the moment, this accounts for a significant overhead. Needless to say, there is less of a question surrounding the benefits in terms of output. Key reasons cited by respondents for outsourcing colour printing were for a more professional finish (29%), as well as speed and size of print run.
Equally is the in-house colour printing optionally more simple? There is a clear perception within industry that colour printers still need to become faster, cheaper, more reliable and capable of higher print quality. SMBs are unconvinced because of their existing colour printer experiences and do not feel that colour printers offer them the service they need to communicate in colour efficiently.
However, the face of colour printing is changing as suppliers have recently introduced colour print technology to meet SMB customer requirements.
New technology, new mindsets
At HP our objective is to offer straightforward, convenient and affordable colour printing. The big challenge here is about changing mindsets. We should not be talking about colour printers as 'premium' products anymore; colour printers should be about high quality content at a lower price point together and excellent performance.
A technology that will help bring about a new age of colour printing is in-line colour laser jet technology. In-line technology allows a printer to work much more quickly with exceptional output quality.
HP has just launched its first ever in-line colour printer, the colour LaserJet 4600 featuring HP vertical in-line technology. This is a revolutionary product because it prints colour as fast as black and white (16 pages per minute in monochrome or colour) without enlarging footprint. Secondly it represents a breakthrough in ease of use; exchanging the reduced number of supplies can be done in seconds, paper jams almost become a thing of the past.
The product contains a vertical stack of four print cartridges which the paper or media is fed passed. This enables the printer to deliver colour to the paper in a single pass, in contrast to traditional products that brought every of the four colours (cyan, yellow, magenta, black) to the paper one after the other, needing four passes. The result is a print speed four times faster that traditional colour lasers.
The Colour LaserJet 4600 featuring HP vertical in-line technology
Rising to the occasion
Investment in other print technologies such as 4-pass and improvement in HP's existing Inkjet ranges are also priorities as we look to raise the standards of colour printing as a whole. HP are providing a series of products based on a series of 'givens' - that colour quality is a given, that speed is a given, that competitive pricing is a given and performance is a given.
Colour print services should be part of our everyday work processes, not a luxury for SMBs. The challenge for the print industry is therefore to increase the effectiveness of all kinds of colour printing to help colour technology become more mainstream for all kinds of customer. As an industry leader investing in both Business Inkjet and Colour LaserJet printing solutions, we are in a strong position to do this.
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