[Web4lib] managing colour printing by the public

[John Fitzgibbon]

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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