This Week in Imaging: Centralized vs. Decentralized Office Printing; Office-Printing Surveys

Photo credit: Kathy Wirth

For those following the business-inkjet market, the big news this week was Brother International’s announcement of four new INKvestment printers and All-in-Ones. Following up on previous INKvestment models introduced in May 2015, the new models offer super-high-yield ink cartridges – for instance the XL versions of Brother’s new INKvestment MFC-J5830DW and MFC-J6535DW are shipped with 16 and 20 ink cartridges, respectively, with these ink cartridges said to provide up to two years worth of printing at monthly print volumes of 450 and 550 pages, respectively.

Both also feature print and copy on up to 11″x 17″ (and in color of course), and the MFC-J63534DW XL also features 11″ x 17″ copy and scan via the platen glass. List prices are also reasonable at $469 and 549, respectively, for the two XL versions.

Brother’s aim here has been to move companies from a centralized print model to a decentralized print model. If you recall, back in the early 1990s with the advent of digital copiers that could print from PCs, the goal of traditional copier vendors trying to get into the printer market was to convince everyone that a high-volume centralized digital printer/copier was more affordable, easier to service, easier to manage, etc., and that desktop printers were costly, with expensive supplies and service, and hard to manage. We ourselves recall writing plenty of marketing collateral for copier vendors at that time arguing the same.

It took reams of such marketing collateral and lots of work to convince many companies that centralized digital copiers were the way to go. Since that time, the copier companies have gained lots of print volume at the expense of printer companies.

Companies such as Brother and Epson (which have seen declining consumer-printing revenue as demand for consumer printing has declined) have sought to decentralize the print environment back to the office environment of the early ’90s. These companies argue that customers are better served with lower-volume desktop All-in-Ones that are located closer to workers and shared by fewer workers, are much more affordably priced (costing hundreds instead of thousands), take up much less space, consume considerably less energy and can be managed just as well as digital copiers. (See Brother: Big MFP/Copiers are Now the Water Cooler for Employees to Gather ‘Round and Waste Time for more on this argument.)

Meanwhile, HP Inc. has been working on providing a best-of-both-worlds approach with A3 digital copiers, recently via its acquisition of Samsung’s printer/copier business, and, on the other hand, with advanced PageWide business inkjets that can be located closer to workers.

For their part, traditional copier companies have responded with their own A4 desktop All-in-Ones and printers – but which can can cost in excess of five-times that of a comparably equipped business inkjet device. On the other hand, many of the these offerings can be expanded with high-end document-workflow solutions, multiple paper sources, and document-finishing while many business inkjets (with the exception of HP’s business inkjets) – for the most part can’t be.

We can’t predict who will win this war, of course, but it appears that those who can provide the best blend of both high-volume digital copiers and budget-friendly lower-volume desktop units are favorably positioned in a global office-printing market, that while very mature, is still worth many tens of billions of dollars.

Office-Imaging News

• Lexmark U.K. Introduces Four-Year Printer Warranty – Read more here.
• ‘Printing for Pocket Change’ – New Brother INKvestment Inkjet Printers Promise a Penny-a-Page for Black Prints – Read more here.
• Two Security Vulnerabilities Found in Lexmark MarkVision Enterprise Fleet-Management Application – Read more here.
• InfoTrends Survey: 40 Percent Say Less than 25 Percent of their Business Content Remains on Paper – Read more here.
• Xerox Survey: 80 Percent of Small and Mid-Size Businesses Want to Reduce Paper Usage – Read more here.
• Four New A4 Color Printers and MFPs from Fuji Xerox with WiFi Direct, Mobile Printing, More – Read more here.
• HP Updates on Printing Group: Instant Ink up 20 Percent, PageWide Portfolio Gains Market Share, More – Read more here.