Stinky Ink News

Finally some good news in the Printer arena. Following hot on the heels of Lexmark’s and Xerox reporting poor performance in Q2 in Tokyo Canon Inc. reports on thursday that profit jumped 17 percent in the April-June quarter on hot-selling copiers, printers and digital cameras, as well as a weaker yen.

Canon has been booming in recent quarters thanks to brisk sales of its popular digital cameras, combination printer-copier-fax machines and single-purpose laser printers.

The company is also planning to roll out a new technology in flat TVs called SED, or surface-conduction electron-emitter display, that will bring it head-to-head with companies like Sony.

A weaker yen helped the bottom line by boosting the value of overseas earnings repatriated home. The company said the yen had dropped 4 percent against the dollar since last year and 12 percent against the euro.

Canon’s business machines and digital camera operations both posted double-digit sales gains, with business machines booking a 12 percent increase and cameras adding 11 percent.

We really like Canons new range of Pixma printers and Multi-Function devices, the quality of the ink is fabulous and this is great news after a run of depressing financial reports. They have also released a raft of new colour laser printers which look very good value

Canon’s printer new manufacturing facility in Vietnam which opened in February this year is now onstream and producing 700,000 printers per month - Canon’s largest anywhere in the world. This combined with their other two existing Vietnamese factories contributed 50% of Canon’s worldwide printer manufacturing

So the battle between inkjet printers and laserjet printers has spilled out of the print speed and convenience medium and onto the Power Highway.

According to research conducted by Techlogg.com the amount of power consumed by different printers varies enormously according to the technology used in the printer. For instance when they compared a Lexmark E230 Mono Printer with a Canon S800 inkjet printer and found huge differences in the amount of power consumed by the printer when actually printin. This is hardly suprising due to the technology involved in the laser printer. The high-voltage corona-discharge/primary charge roller mechanism laser printers use to print requires plenty of electricity, but also enables the printer to print far more quickly than the inkjet printer.

They concluded ‘Whilst sitting quietly, our test unit pulled 5.9-watts but start printing and that high-voltage charge mechanism really sucks on the power cord, eating through 699.2-watts for brief periods during each page print.

By contrast, we tested a late-model Canon S800 individual ink-tank inkjet printer and even when printing, it only consumed 13.1-watts on average, pushing up to 19-watts when the paper-loading stepper motors kick in.

When in standby mode, it pulls just 1.3-watts and when powered up but not printing, the power consumption only rises to 4.9-watts, similar to that of our test laser printer.

In terms of energy efficiency in printing, inkjet printers leave laser printers for dead but for the rest of the time, the standby power consumption is very similar.

VERDICT: Inkjet printers use up to 90% less power than laser printers while printing but things are pretty much even in standby mode.’.

I would like time to compare the actual cost per page of each printer, because the laser will spit out probably 4 - 5 times the amount of printing that the inkjet will in the same time, thus the inkjet will use more power over the longer period required to match the laserjet output. As usual with Green issues, more questions than answers!

You can read the original article here

Canon have launched a host of new laser printers recently, all of which are now listed on the stinkyink website with the appropriate consumables, here is a quick list of them:

• i-SENSYS LBP5360 - iSENSYS LBP5360 With PCL support, networking and automatic double sided printint as standard this high specification, compact colour laser printer delivers fast, professional output for the most demanding workgroups
• i-SENSYS LBP5300 - This network ready colour laser printer provides high-quality shared printing for professional use, with 21ppm colour and mono output, automatic double-sided printing and All-in-One colour cartridges
• Laser Shot LBP-5200 - The Laser Shot LBP5200 offers the fast, affordable solution for colour and black and white laser printing. Advanced Canon technologies ensure quick output speed, high print quality and easy operation.
• i-SENSYS LBP5100 - Compact, quiet and easy to use, this laser printer delivers high quality colour output at an impressive speed. Cut paper costs and create double-sided documents with built-in automatic duplexing.
• i-SENSYS LBP5000 - Benefit from fast, professional colour output at 8 pages per minute with this smart, quiet and space-saving printer. Convenient maintenance-free colour All-in-One cartridges ensure added ease.
• i-SENSYS LBP3460 - Get a complete out-of-the-box solution for professional quality laser printing. The 33 ppm print speed is combined with PCL5e/6 support, built-in networking and duplexing plus a large paper supply
• i-SENSYS LBP3360 - Share productive, professional output with this compact and robust network-ready laser printer. Advantages include a 21ppm print speed, PCL5e/6 and UFRII* support and automatic double-sided printing
• i-SENSYS LBP3300 - This space-saving and easy-to-use unit provides professional laser output at 21 pages per minute - with double-sided printing, a flexible paper supply and optional networking
• i-SENSYS LBP3000 - Get the print speed you need and the laser quality you expect, with the i-SENSYS LBP3000. Advanced Canon technologies ensure fast output, enhanced print quality and exceptional ease of use.
• i-SENSYS LBP2900 - The small, stylish i-SENSYS LBP2900 produces professional laser prints, quickly and quietly. Extra easy to use, it delivers consistently high quality output thanks to Canon’s All-in-One cartridge.

In December 2002, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) criticised the four major manufacturers, Epson, http://www.stinkyinkshop.co.uk/acatalog/Canon_Printers_Inkjet_Cartridges.html, HP and Lexmark, over the lack of information available to consumers about the longevity of inkjet cartridges and the true cost of ownership.

In its report it said this lack of transparency regarding the price and performance of inkjet printer cartridges was unfair to consumers. The OFT claimed that 78 per cent of consumers use only the cartridges recommended by the manufacturer, which means expenditure on these consumables over the lifetime of a printer can amount to more than double the original cost of the printer.

The OFT called on the industry to devise a standard testing method for page yield and for these results to be made available by retailers to consumers at the point of sale and in promotional literature.

It also said the cartridge manufacturers should set up webpages where consumers can compare page yield and estimate the overall costs.

This standard was meant to be in place by the end of 2003 but the OFT gave the industry additional time.

In December last year (2006), the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), in conjunction with a consortium of printer manufactures including HP, Canon, Epson and Lexmark, approved new standards for accurately measuring how many pages inkjet cartridges would print.

The ISO 19752 standard for testing and quoting of yield for mono printing on mono laser printers already exists, and now this latest ISO standard for colour printing on colour printers ISO 24712 has been implemented. This standard was agreed and developed in consultation with the major inkjet printer manufacturers and they have all developed areas on their websites which detail the individual cartridge yields.

It is easy to see how the ISO standards offer a big improvement – standard test pages, standard test methodology and standard way of calculating and quoting the yield which should mean that as a consumer you should be able to make an objective assessment of the true cost of ownership (TCO) of your next inkjet printer.

However, even at this stage there is the view that perhaps the new standards do not go far enough, in that the standard does not address all the issues surrounding printing of monochrome pages on colour systems.

In essence, the test programme specifies a five-page document to be printed as continuously as the paper feed of the printer allows. The 5 pages are mono letter, two data presentation pages and a block and line test pattern. The yield is quoted as the number of pages printed when the cartridge runs out.

The difficulty is that in the real-world environment, the mix between colour and monochrome printing varies according to workgroup and individual. Thus it seems more useful to test to two standards, for mono and for colour, separately on the same machine. Having such data would further assist in addressing any decision to upgrade to colour printers - and indeed make realistic comparisons with the yield on Multifunction, All-in-One systems which add a further major dimension to the cost equation.

Now HP have stated publicly that the system is not accurate because the test is a continous test and does not take into account normal usage, which is to print some pages and then stop for some time and then print again. Some printers run a clean print head routine if they have not been used for some time thus using more ink than other printers who have integrated print heads into the cartridge (guess which manufacturer uses this technique? - HP of course!).

Apparently the Manufacturers have until the end of this year to ratify the ISO agreement, and HP are going back with new proposals to amend the test methodology in light of the information that they have gathered over the past few months of having to detail much more fully page yields.

Here at Stinkyink Towers we will publish as much information on each cartridge as we have available to enable you to compare your true printing costs and will keep you up to date on these developments