Printers expand creative horizons

Nation's Business, Jan, 1998 by Tim McCollum

La Fonda Restuarant specializes in spicy Southwestern and Mexican dishes served in a festive atmosphere. But food isn't the only thing created there.

While the cooks at the Artesia, N.M., restaurant rustle up fajitas, chiles rellenos, and the like, the CEO and manager, Bob Perkins, cooks up menus, wall decorations, and other displays on the company's color laser printer.

Perkins bought the printer, a Xerox XPrint 4915, two years ago. At the time, the company was paying a printing company to create colorful menus. However, the high cost of commercial color printing deterred Perkins from changing food offerings and prices as often as he would have liked.

To reduce printing costs, he bought an inexpensive inkjet printer to produce menu supplements, but the inks ran when liquids spilled on the menus. The color laser printer solved his problems. It enables Perkins to change menus whenever he feels it's advantageous, and the laser ink holds up well to spills and stains.

Once, business people used printers almost exclusively to produce letters, spreadsheets, and other black-and-white text documents. Now, resourceful entrepreneurs such as Perkins use their printers for much more. It's not that these business people suddenly have become more imaginative about using printers, it's that printers have become more capable.

"In recent years there's been a steady march toward high print quality," says Ken Weilerstein, an analyst with Datapro Information Services Group, a market-research firm in Delran, N.J. "Plus, graphical capabilities that would have required companies to go to a print shop before have been subsumed into printing, bringing desktop publishing into the mainstream."

Moreover, as with personal computers and many other types of office equipment, the prices of all types of printers have declined even as their capabilities have increased.

That doesn't mean, however, that all printers are low-cost devices. Perkins paid $6,300 for his color laser, but he believes the printer's output quality and versatility justify the investment.

For example, Perkins uses the color laser not only to print menus but also to produce colorful promotional materials, welcome banners and signs, and customized menus for holidays, special events, and groups. "It gives you an original touch that makes people feel special," says Perkins. "It's fresh, and it's become kind of fun."

Moreover, the printer supports the restaurant's thriving ancillary business of selling jars of jalapenos and salsa to area grocery stores. Perkins uses his PC and printer to create different versions of product labels, which he says are comparable in quality to professionally printed labels. By test marketing different labels, Perkins can see which ones work best before he commits to commercial printing of large quantities.

The type of printer a small-business person should buy and the amount that should be spent depend on the firm's needs, says Paula Bursley, a printer analyst with Dataquest, a market-research firm in San Jose, Calif.

"If I were a small-business owner, I'd look at what I needed to do," Bursley says. "If text printing was what I principally needed, I'd look at a low-cost monochrome laser. If I needed basic color, I'd look at one of the better inkjets."

Frequently the "right" choice, she adds, is a combination of printers such as a monochrome laser network printer for documents and a color inkjet for graphics.

Many firms will be tempted to base their decision primarily on purchase price, but Datapro's Weilerstein cautions that it's the total cost of buying and maintaining a printer that counts.

For example, although inkjet printers cost less than lasers, they are more expensive to operate because the ink cartridges, which cost $20 to $30 each, must be replaced frequently. In contrast, the black toner cartridge used by monochrome lasers can cost up to $100 but typically lasts a long time. Color lasers are more expensive to maintain than monochrome lasers because they have more components, and network printers require the same sort of ongoing maintenance as an office copier.

"The purchase cost of the printer has come down," says Weilerstein. "That shifts the focus to its true cost. In the big picture, you're looking at the cost of installing it and the cost of keeping it supplied, which can be a considerable amount of money."

To help business people choose the type of printer or combination of printers best suited to their needs, here are comparisons of the relative strengths and approximate costs of today's most common printer technologies:

Inkjet Printers

Nearly all of today's inkjet devices can print in color and black and white, allowing users to create attractive brochures, presentations, and other artwork.

These printers work by spraying tiny drops of ink onto a variety of media, ranging from plain paper or greeting-card stock to clear film and T-shirts. Recent technology advances also allow users to print lab-quality photos on heavy, glossy paper. This versatility has made inkjets popular among consumers as well as small- and home-office users.