[Web4lib] managing colour printing by the public

[jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu]

Our campus recently looked a bit at charges for printing across campus labs.
We found that on our own campus there is a very wide range of charges, from
free to quite expensive.  Correspondingly there is a range of reasons given
for the chosen charges, from cost recovery to saving trees to subsidizing
particular instructional uses of printing or using low cost printing as a
way to attract users to other services.  Those units who use cost recovery
as a criterion report widely different prices, suggesting that the details
of what printer you choose, what your volume is, how you account for
maintenance and support, and how you manage the service can have a big
impact on your actual costs.

Costs for b&w printing have been fairly stable for several years, but the
cost of color printing and copying is falling quite quickly, mostly due to
economies of scale and reductions in fixed costs rather than cost per page. 

Note that if you are doing color printing you may also want to consider
various specialized color printing services (large formats, transparencies,
glossy stock, etc.) which often have wildly different costs.  Also, toner
costs vary widely depending on type of print job -- a web page with 5% spot
color is very different from a full page photo.

You might also look at commercial providers for insight.  Our local Kinko's
charges $.08 for single sided b&w on 8.5"x11" plain paper, and $.89 for
single sided color.  I believe that most universities can get their actual
costs down substantially below that for color, but I suspect the
differential between mono and color is currently more like 5x than the
proposed 3x.

JQ Johnson, Director                 Office: 115F Knight Library 
Center for Educational Technologies  mailto:jqj at uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon            phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR 97403-1299                http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/