Production Printer Performance: Signs It’s Time for an Upgrade

While office printers are designed for relatively light printing work and wide format printers can create spectacular canvases, a production printer can act as workhorses that handle large print runs and rarely missing a beat. They’re built to deliver high-volume output day in and day out.

But have you perhaps noticed that your prints are not as good as they used to be? If your printer is starting to slow down or jam frequently, you might be facing hidden costs in both time and money. Deciding whether to stick with your current printer or invest in a new model can be challenging. Let’s explore how you can determine the right time for an upgrade.

Key Metrics to Track for Production Printer Performance

You can approach your production printer much like any resource or pipeline in your company. After all, it’s a vital part of making sure your products or services stay on track or your marketing is top-notch. You can evaluate your printer’s performance through key performance indicators (KPIs), which can help you decide if it’s time for a change. Although measuring print quality may seem subjective, there are a few objective metrics that you can drill into.

Image Quality

At its core, a production printer is expected to churn out a large number of pages quickly and uniformly. To gauge quality, consider factors such as:

• Resolution and Detail: Measured in dots per inch (DPI), higher resolution ensures crisp images and text.
• Color Accuracy: Often quantified in delta E values, this determines how faithfully colors are reproduced.
• Registration Accuracy: Ensuring that ink layers line up correctly without misalignment in dots or pixels.
• Defects and Errors: Frequent misprints or flaws can indicate deteriorating performance.
• Finishing Options: If your printer offers additional features like binding or cutting, assess both their quality and versatility.

There are only a few “definitive” figures here, as you will sometimes encounter minute print variations that simply come from the volume work. From a practical standpoint, compare the number of prints that meet your quality standards against the total output. If less than 95% of your prints are acceptable, you may be incurring unnecessary waste and costs. This might sound like a supremely high cut-off, but if you’re printing thousands of pages, 5% is 50 pages per every 1,000.

How Quickly Does the Printer Work?

Production printers are engineered for speed, yet older models or those handling oversized media might not deliver on their promises. Key aspects to evaluate include:

• Pages Per Minute (PPM): The basic measure of how many pages the printer produces in a minute.
• Warm-Up Time: The delay before the printer is ready to start printing after being powered on.
• Time to First Page: How quickly the printer produces the initial print after receiving a command.
• Cycle Time: The duration required to print an individual page or a small batch, which can vary depending on the project size.

Compare these figures with the manufacturer’s specifications. While real-world performance may fall slightly below the stated numbers, a deviation of more than about 10% could signal an aging or underperforming machine. You could look into maintenance first, as you might have a fixable issue, before moving on to purchasing a new production printer.

The Economics of Printing

Beyond performance, it’s essential to understand the operational costs of your printer. These include:

• Consumables: Paper, ink, or toner expenses can add up quickly.
• Energy Consumption: Examine the electricity costs over long operating hours.
• Maintenance: Be prepared for regular servicing and repairs.
• Labor: This is the time employees spend managing the printer, including troubleshooting and reprints. You can directly translate this into manhours and the money spent on it.

Break down these costs by project type if needed. For instance, producing large banners may incur higher costs per print compared to simple flyers, given the additional time and resources required. It will help you determine whether a printer is not suitable for a particular type of work.

Reliability

Printer downtime can be a major disruption. Imagine a critical print job getting halted by a jam or a malfunction. Each minute lost can cost your business money and delay important projects. High uptime is crucial for maintaining productivity and meeting deadlines, making reliability a key factor in your evaluation.

Personalized Feedback

The day-to-day experiences of your team can provide invaluable insights. Check whether employees frequently report issues like jams, slow response times, or the need for constant maintenance calls. After all, they are the ones spending their working hours operating the printer, so they’ll likely have first-hand experience. These observations are strong indicators that the printer is no longer meeting operational demands. While qualitative, this feedback should be considered alongside quantitative KPIs to form a complete picture.

Recognizing the Limitations of Aging Devices

Aside from performance, there are other signs that an older printer might be more trouble than it’s worth, which typically boil down to the printer being obsolete due to age and technological progress.

Outdated Technology and Parts

Technology evolves rapidly. A printer that was cutting-edge a decade ago may now struggle with compatibility issues or suffer from parts that are difficult—or even impossible—to replace. A single component failure in an obsolete model can render the entire machine useless, leading to costly disruptions.

Environmental and Noise Considerations

Older printers often need more electricity to operate, may take longer to print, or produce more noise than their modern counterparts. Excessive noise can disrupt the work environment, and inefficient devices may also conflict with a company’s sustainability goals. Upgrading to a model with a lower environmental footprint can benefit both your staff and your corporate responsibility initiatives.

Connectivity Challenges

A modern production printer frequently offer advanced connectivity options, remote management, and seamless integration with workflow or document management software. If your current printer is limited to basic, cable-only connections, it may hinder your ability to streamline operations and improve efficiency.

Making the Decision: Upgrading Your Production Printer

Sometimes, you just know that you have a problem, but you might not realize exactly what the problem is. And that can happen with your production printer. It’s quite possible that a working production printer just isn’t suitable for your needs, whether due to connectivity limitations, lack of modern features, or simply slow speed.

Either way, the best way to move forward is to perform an audit of your business’s printing requirements. To do that, you can enlist the help of a professionally managed print provider like Copiers Northwest. With dozens of years of experience, Copiers Northwest has seen countless printer models come into focus and fade into obscurity, and we can determine which is the best fit for you.

So, if you have printer needs (or even just questions) and your business is in Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Yakima, Portland, Tri-Cities, Spokane, Bend, Salem, or Eugene, don’t hesitate to contact Copiers Northwest today to get started on your custom detailed printing plan.