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1The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White
2The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Print Speed: General
3The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Print Speed: Multipass
4The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Print Speed: Data Processing
Print Speed: Data Processing Advantage: B&W Even if a color printer and a B&W printer have the same raw engine speed, the color printer can take longer to print complex images. Color pages sometimes have three times as much data as the equivalent page in B&W, and more data takes more time to process.
5The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – First-Page-Out Time
6The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Monthly Duty Cycle: General
Monthly Duty Cycle: General Advantage: B&W At any price point, a monochrome printer will usually have a higher maximum duty cycle–the maximum number of pages it can print per month without driving up repair costs. Fortunately, though, most color and monochrome printers have higher maximum duty cycles than most offices need. (The rule of thumb: For maximum printer lifetime, the duty cycle should be three times your actual print volume.)
7The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Monthly Duty Cycle: Multipass
Monthly Duty Cycle: Multipass Advantage: B&W For color printers that need four passes for each page, the monthly duty cycle advantage for monochrome printers is even more than the specs suggest. The color printers duty cycle is really measured in passes, not pages, with one pass per mono page and four passes per color page.
8The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Paper Handling
Paper Handling Advantage: B&W Because paper-handling features usually go hand-in-hand with faster speed and higher duty cycle, a monochrome printer at any given price will usually have better paper-handling features, whether standard or as options that a color model doesn’t offer. Possibilities include a higher paper capacity; duplexing; or a stacker, sorter or finisher.
9The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Size and Weight
10The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Text Quality
Text Quality Advantage: A Draw Text quality is too important an issue not to mention, but its also not much of a consideration when choosing between color and monochrome printers. Although text quality certainly varies from one printer to another, there’s no consistent pattern that favors either monochrome or color models.
11The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Graphics Quality: General
12The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Graphics Quality: Graphics
Graphics Quality: Graphics Advantage: Color All other things are rarely equal. Even ignoring the color itself–and even when printing B&W images–color printers tend to do a better job on graphics. They are much less likely to show flaws such as dithering and are much more likely to keep subtle shading that tends to disappear with monochrome printers.
13The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Making Graphics Make Sense
14The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Printing Photos: Business Needs
15The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Printing Photos: Monochrome Images
Printing Photos: Monochrome Images Advantage: Color When it comes to printing B&W photos, nearly all color printers do a better job than monochrome printers. In many cases, color printers create shades of gray as a composite of cyan, yellow and magenta dots, a technique that allows much more subtle gradations–and thus better-looking photos–than a monochrome printer can deliver.
16The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Client or Company Newsletters
Client or Company Newsletters Advantage: Color Even the New York Times, the celebrated Gray Lady of the newspaper world, eventually gave in to using color photos. If you print company newsletters for internal use or for sending out to clients and customers, using color appropriately will give your newsletters a much more professional look.
17The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Marketing Materials
18The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Copying Using Multifunction Devices
Copying Using Multifunction Devices Advantage: Color Any current MFP (multifunction printer) will scan in color. The combination of a color scanner and printer makes the MFP a color copier as well. That’s a lot more convenient, and less expensive, than running to a copy shop when you need color copies.
19The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Saving on Outsourcing
Saving on Outsourcing Advantage: Color If you farm out color print jobs–for anything from one-page mailers to multipage reports–a color printer can easily pay for itself. For example, saving just 25 cents per page on 100 pages per month translates to $900 over three years — or $1,500 over five years.
20The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Initial Cost
21The Age-Old Printer Battle: Color vs. Black and White – Total Cost of Ownership
Total Cost of Ownership Advantage: Depends Given higher initial costs for a color printer and for each color page, it seems obvious that the TCO should be higher for color models than for B&W models. But, if you include the money saved on outsourcing by printing color pages yourself, TCO can actually be cheaper for color. So don’t assume color will cost more. Do the math to find out.