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GCN Home > 04/28/03 issue

Color makes a play

By David Essex, Special to GCN

High speeds, low prices put color lasers in the game

When it comes to adding red, yellow or blue to government printing, the primary color is green—as in, is it affordable and fast enough to justify replacing a monochrome workhorse?

Increasingly, agencies are indeed adding color—and the instruments of choice are not cheap, slow, expensively maintained ink-jets, but durable, sub-$3,000 laser printers that can be networked and shared so efficiently that nearly every workgroup can afford one.

Vendors say color is now used for more than just its original killer app: handouts of Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Among the applications most in demand is color highlighting in training manuals and spreadsheets.

“In some parts of the government, they are looking for quality photo images for identification cards,” said Keith Shaw, director of marketing for vendor Oki Data Americas Inc., citing the Mexican government’s plan to print cards on special tear-resistant media.
Xerox Phaser 7700DN
Image:
The Xerox Phaser 7700DN is a single-pass laser with 600-by 1,200-dpi resolution rated to print 22 ppm in monochrome or color. It’s priced at $6,999.
The U.S. armed services use Oki Data printers to provide soldiers with color maps. Lexmark International Inc. says the Air Force uses its printers to reproduce aerial views and other photographs for pilots. The city of Wichita, Kan., uses four Xerox Phaser 7300s to pump out its annual budget, as well as maps and everyday office documents in four departments. Xerox Corp. also counts the Navy, Forest Service and intelligence agencies among its large users. The intelligence users “actually won’t tell us what they are doing with them, but they bought thousands last year,” said Ken Knewpper, Xerox’s product marketing manager.

One at a time

Color has come a long way on laser and LED printers, especially since the advent about three years ago of single-pass technology—also known as tandem or in-line printing. Crayonlike solid-ink cartridge printers, pioneered by Tektronix Inc. and acquired by Xerox, were single-pass upon their introduction years earlier.

Single-pass technology lets the four primary colors fuse to paper in one clean pass, rather than needing repeated passes for each color toner. The result: a leap in per-minute page rates from low single digits up to around 30. At the same time, the price difference between printing monochrome pages on color printers instead of black-and-white printers has nearly disappeared. “We’ve brought the cost per page down to where it’s comparable to our monochrome printers,” said David Steinforth, a Lexmark marketing manager.

The color market grew 25 percent in the past year, according to market researcher Gartner Dataquest of San Jose, Calif. The dominant player, by far, is Hewlett-Packard Co., which shipped 51 percent of the 314,816 color units sold last year in the United States. Other leaders include Xerox, with 19 percent; Minolta-QMS USA Inc., with 13 percent, and Lexmark, with 6 percent.