[Web4lib] managing colour printing by the public

[Bill Teschek]

John,

One solution would be to have two printers available for printing -- one being 
your new color printer and the other being a plain B&W. Make the B&W the 
default printer, but have the color also available so that people wanting to 
use it can select it from the print dialog box. That way you are less likely to 
have people printing in color by mistake. You can even put the price of the 
copies in the printer name so that they will know what they are getting into 
when they select a printer.

We charge 10 cents for B&W copies and 25 for color at our library, but have 
never done any kind of cost study. I'd be interested to learn if someone has.

Bill Teschek
Assistant Director
Lane Memorial Library
2 Academy Ave.
Hampton, NH 03842
603.926.3368
bteschek at hampton.lib.nh.us

John Fitzgibbon wrote:

> Hi,
>  
> We have received a grant from the government to install colour laser
> printers on the networks for the public. In our libraries, we charge for
> printing. Heretofore, we only provided black and white copies. Now that
> we have the option of colour the issue of charging different rates
> arises. The colour printer uses four toners (cyan, magenta, yellow, and
> black) whereas the black and white printer uses one toner. This
> presumably will not quadruple the cost.  Few colours will require the
> use of all four toners and four popular colours require only one toner.
> We are thinking of charging three times as much for a colour copy as for
> a black and white copy. Are our assumptions correct? Does colour
> printing cost approximately three times as much as black and white
> printing? We are only interested in recovering the cost of printing, not
> the cost of the printer.
>  
> Secondly, when a user clicks on print, we would like them to be given
> the option of choosing colour or black and white. Is there any software
> that will do this for us? At the moment the user has to go into
> properties and make the change here. It is difficult to always remember
> to do this and it is somewhat unfair to penalize someone for this
> oversight. In many of our libraries, the printer is at the circulation
> desk. The user goes to the circulation desk to receive their copies.
> This means that we do not need a print server solution. In our larger
> libraries we use LPT1. Is there cheap software that will simply prompt
> the user to choose colour or black and white copies?
>  
> Regards
> John
> 
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