Three Classes of High-Volume Printers
The secret to understanding the high-volume printer market is not to view it as a homogeneous entity. Despite the small number of machines, it really encompasses three distinct —though now usually overlapping environments: back-office printing, high-volume document printing, and print-on-demand/publishing printing.
Back-office printing
Traditionally, high-volume printers have been used principally for delivering printing services to mainframe and large minicomputer systems kept in so-called back-office environments where they are not accessible for other types of work. Typical applications include high-volume production of billing statements, data-center reports, form letters, and the like. Often, the computer systems concerned are at the mature end of their technology curves — hence the word “legacy” is often used to refer to these printers and the environments in which they operate.
Some high-volume printers are used solely in legacy environments and cannot, even theoretically, be networked to cater to a wider range of computer platforms. This guide does not cover back-office models whose legacy orientation is as narrow as that. Other machines, however, are capable of working as network printers, even if this is not how they are most commonly used in practice; those machines do fall within our coverage.
Machines belonging to the back-office category are not typically used to print what can broadly be described as “documents” (assuming you don’t classify a billing statement or a bunch of statistical reports as such). You shouldn’t count on them being able to rasterize jobs (that is, convert them to printable format) just once and then efficiently produce multiple copies a litmus test of what constitutes efficient “document printing.” What they are well suited for is printing lots of pages based on a single template but with variable data, such as the different names and addresses found on bills and form letters. They feature software that makes it easy to slot in new information quickly, whereas more mainstream printers are far less efficient when performing this type of work.
While it used to be that such printers featured resolutions that fell short of the 600dpi, which is commonplace in other segments of the high-volume printer market, this is rapidly changing. On the other hand, it is often the case that these printers have to work at low resolutions in order to be compatible with their host computer systems. Their paper handling can also be pretty basic, although users often have access to completely separate off-line equipment, such as folders and inserters, mailing systems, perforators, and so forth.
What these printers do offer, and mid-volume printers do not, are very high duty cycles. Typically, they are rated by their manufacturers for around 750,000— 1,000,000 pages a month. Back-office printers have been traditionally economical to operate, with some of the lowest costs per page you can find in the printer industry. Purchase prices are high, however — you should expect to encounter list prices ranging from around $35,000 to over $100,000.
Keep in mind that in order to work with legacy computer systems, back-office printers need to be compatible with the data streams used in these environments. When perusing specifications, you’ll encounter various cryptic sets of letters referencing the printing protocols that exist in the mainframe and minicomputer worlds, such as the IBM-inspired Intelligent Printer Data Stream (IPDS). On the other hand, the very latest machines support PostScript, PCL, and PDF workflows
High-volume document printing
The second category in the high-volume printer market consists of high-volume document printers that are designed to produce multiple copies of documents in varying run lengths but with some emphasis on medium- and long-run applications. They are intended to be used on a network and to be accessible by “ordinary” users in busy front-office environments, as opposed to being available only to skilled operators in print rooms.
These machines cater to so-called Mopying applications — this term refers to “multiple original printing” (namely, printing as many original copies of a document as you need instead of printing only one set and then producing the rest on a copier). Mopying caught on first in the mid-volume printer market — especially in the 24—4oppm segment — but it has made its way into the high-volume arena, too. Mopying is also known as electronic collation.
Mopying-enabled printers are designed so that they can rasterize a document just once before making as many sets as required. They tend to have paper handling similar to that of copiers — multiple paper sources and automatic staplers, for example. Indeed, high-volume mopiers offer printing services that are in many ways very similar to those of copier-based multifunctional machines (of the type reviewed in our Mid-Volume Copier & Multifunctional Guide and High-Volume Copier & Multifunctional Guide). The latter are copier-centric products that are capable of being networked so that they serve as combination copier-printers.
In fact, much of the new generation of relatively affordable high-volume mopying printers are copier-derived products; essentially, they are multifunctional copiers minus the copier function. Most of the copier companies, recognizing a shift away from copying and toward printing, plan to offer printer-only variants of their multifunctional copiers. So far, Canon, Konica, and Oce have introduced models. For the most part, future copier-based products offered as single-function printers from most companies will not have upgrade paths allowing you to add the copier function later, although you’ll be able to upgrade from a copier-only configuration to a copier-printer combo.
Although copier-derived products provide some of the blood for this segment of the high-volume printer market, sellers of traditional back-office models are attempting to make some of their models a little more front-office friendly by offering higher resolutions, finishing, and mopy-efficient job processing on certain models. The idea is not that these machines will necessarily be physically situated in front-office environments but that they will at least be available on networks to handle certain types of long-run document printing. That said, their high prices and often-narrow distribution channels would restrict their appeal.
The most fertile ground for high-volume document printer growth is going to be in the 50—85ppm speed range. Document printers are by far the most affordable machines in the high-volume market — while there are not yet many machines to choose from, buyers can expect prices starting at around $20,000. An interesting challenge comes from Hewlett-Packard’s new S0ppm LaserJet 9000 series, which starts at $3,299, but this product family has one foot in the mid-volume printer market and the other in the high-volume market.
Print-on.demand publishing
Printers in this category are used for the production of documents — including thick manuals and books — in high page counts but often in very short run lengths. The idea is that instead of producing massive inventories of manuals, books, and other publications that are subject to information obsolescence, you print just the quantity required to address immediate needs.
Another facet of on-demand printing is the ability to customize documents or personalize them for particular individuals. For example, specific paragraphs or sentences can be added to product manuals based on the software or options purchased. Likewise, reports can be assembled so that only information of value to the reader is printed. As well as making publications more user-friendly, this can reduce printing and distribution costs by eliminating materials that are irrelevant and don’t get read. For more on this issue, see the sidebar on variable data and customized printing.
In classic print-on-demand environments, it is sometimes said that the representative job has a run length of one. But do not confuse short-run printing with low-volume output — these machines are designed to operate nonstop and are often found in the most demanding environments. Printers designed for this type of work have very powerful processing capabilities so that streams of short-run jobs can be output with minimal wait times between each one.
The machines are typically sold with a number of output options for automatically finishing the printed documents by stapling or binding pages; inserting tabs, covers, and other color pages; and even folding pages. In other words, the paper-handling characteristics of print-on-demand/publishing equipment can resemble and even surpass those of high-volume copiers found in production environments the fundamental difference in usage being that the copiers are used for producing long runs of identical documents, while the printers are used for producing high volumes of unique ones.
Given all this, it is rarely the case that every job has a run length of one. In practice, it is often the case that the same machine is used for a mixture of high-volume on demand printing and long-run printing of a more traditional nature.
Printers in the on-demand/high-volume
Publishing market often come with software for assembling jobs out of a variety of elements: scanned images (if equipped with an optional scanner) and PostScript, PDF, and TIFF files. The ability to handle PDF workflows is an especially important capability since this format is particularly well suited for printing pages with complex layouts and typography. In addition, most systems offer some kind of document-management software.
Like most other things in this market, high-volume print-on-demand/publishing systems are not cheap. List prices range from around $75,000 to over $300,000. But we may see some movement in the near future, as some of the 75—95ppm machines are getting more reasonable in price, increasingly under $50,000. For some businesses, buying two or three Konica Force 75s or Canon imageRUNNER 85s is less expensive than buying a single 110-11 5 ppm printer, plus they get a backup system in case one of their machines has mechanical problems. Vendors such as Xerox and Heidelberg may have to adjust pricing if this trend continues.
Hybrids:
While we have identified three separate classes of high-volume printers, the reality is that individual models often address more than one application. For example, a machine with a print-on-demand bias might nonetheless also carry out long-run document printing — these machines can have a broader in-house publishing role. It is certainly also true that fashionable “print-on-demand-speak” will be heard in some high-volume document printer sales pitches (regardless of how optimized the machines are for that type of work).
Likewise, as noted above, some back-office models catering mainly to legacy environments may also be able to handle general-purpose, high-volume document printing when required. That said, it is usually possible to identify one of the three applications as defining a machine’s core personality.
An interesting example of this is Heidelberg’s 9110 engine. Heidelberg sells it as a print-on-demand/high-volume publishing machine and packages it with software that supports those activities. IBM uses the same hardware but positions it primarily as a back-office-oriented printer, using the appropriate software. Canon also offers the same printer engine but takes a more traditional document-oriented approach. You can also see a similar mixing of printer classes in Xerox’s DocuTech (print-on-demand/publishing along with document printing) and DocuPrint (document printing and back-office printing) product families.
Prospects for Growth:
In general, the high-volume printer market appears to have a rosy future. Staggering numbers of documents are being created every day, and high-volume printers continue to get a major slice of the business associated with reproducing them.
On the other hand, growth in the back-office printing segment is somewhat limited. Fewer companies are installing new mainframe computers, and there is a greater reliance on distributed computing using networked PCs. As a result, an increasing number of pages are being produced on printers in the general office. There is still an important role for back-office printers to play, but the need is relatively stable.
Interestingly, high-volume document printers are a growth area for some of the same reasons that back-office printers are stagnant. As these machines have come down in price, they have increasingly found their way onto networks where a greater number of users can experience their faster speeds. Mopying as an industry-wide trend may also be responsible for their growing popularity.
The print-on-demand/high-volume publishing segment shows solid growth, as these models continue to capture page volume that previously was produced on offset presses.
Centralized versus distributed:
In an era when the trend is moving away from first printing documents and then distributing them (and toward distributing them electronically and printing them locally), the need for long print runs at individual locations is logically diminishing. Don’t get us wrong — we are not saying that long run printing is history, just that the need for it is decreasing.
This being so, many buyers will want to distribute their document printing as opposed to centralizing it. This could mean, for example, getting more sub-$ 10,000 30—40ppm machines and fewer of the new, $20,000+
50—B0ppm ones. Keep in mind that you can now get a 40ppm network printer with advanced paper handling including automatic stapling for around $6,000 list or below $5,000 on the street. In other words, you can get three or four 40ppm printers for roughly the same amount as you may be asked to pay for one 60ppm model.
The point here is that when you cross from the mid-volume market into high-volume territory, you take a bigger step up the price ladder than up the speed ladder. Vendors of so-called cluster printing solutions have begun trying to take advantage of this price gap by harnessing several mid-volume printers together to achieve high-volume speeds at mid-volume prices (see the sidebar on page 33 for more on this). In fairness, the duty cycles of high-volume models tend to rise by more than the engine speed, although mid-volume machines are generally built to withstand any level of work you’re likely to throw their way in practice.
Human factors:
The notion of being able to control the entire document-creation process from your PC, while enjoying high-volume copier-style speeds and document finishing, is one that many people will find very attractive. It can beat printing out one copy of a multipage document and then taking it over to a high-volume copier. The savings in human time is definitely something that has to be considered in an overall cost analysis.
On the other hand, some users could find that high-volume document printers will put more demands on their time. This is because having these pricey machines take over from slower models will inevitably mean more people having to share the same centralized equipment.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it is important to keep in mind that although you can send jobs to a printer from the desktop, the printer cannot send the output back to you — you still have to go get it! Hence the notion that you can do everything from the desktop is not strictly true; the proximity of the device to where people work does become a productivity issue. Personal and workgroup printers located right next door are a highly prized possession in corporate office life, and not everyone will take kindly to losing them.
A related problem has to do with the confidence that people will have in sending jobs to an unattended network device located outside their immediate work area when they lack current information about how well the machine is working, the type and quantity of paper in the different trays, and so forth. These concerns can be addressed to some extent through software solutions that provide a two-way flow of information between the desktop and the machine, but it remains to be seen how many of these human anxieties will persist.
The solution many companies may elect is to buy a high-volume printer to supplement, not replace, network printers in the general office. That way, you can do the routine jobs on the network printers and send the more complex jobs to the high-volume unit.
Conclusion
The prospects for high-volume printers have become more attractive as their prices have come down and their ability to meet the needs of a broader audience has improved. The latest models offer impressive speed and versatility, necessary attributes for keeping up with.
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