Struggling photo giant Kodak attracted a lot of attention with its recent introduction of multifunction products (MFPs) for home users. The MFPs' claim to fame isn't the low prices of the devices themselves. Rather it's the $10 and $15 retail price points for the associated monochrome and color cartridges.

According to BusinessWeek, consumers who buy bundles of Kodak ink and paper could see per-print costs as low as 10 cents, which provides a powerful marketing message for Kodak to exploit. Railing against the price of consumables is about as risky for Kodak as campaigning against high taxes is for a politician seeking elective office.

All of which means that solution providers should prepare for consumables-costs questions from their business customers. Fortunately, there's ammunition.

"More and more new products are coming with consumables that offer higher yields and lower costs that reduce TCO [Total Cost of Ownership] over time," notes Philip Grote, industry analyst for market researcher Current Analysis.

The benefits of these high-yield cartridges vary depending on model and manufacturer, but cost savings range from 5 to 10 percent, compared to older cartridges, he adds. 

Solution providers should also make budget-conscious clients aware of access control and job-accounting tools from OEMs and third parties. Access controls assure that employees choose color resources only for appropriate materials, not for hard copies of Web pages or personal photographs.

In addition, applications like Preo Software's Printelligence Enterprise help contain costs with a pop-up screen that shows the per-page price of a job before it enters the print queue. This gives end users a chance to rethink their settings and perhaps choose monochrome when appropriate.

(Source: printandimage.com)

Of course the easiest way to reduce the cost of consumables is to have us remanufacture or refill your cartridges.  With our savings of up to 50% off the cost of a new cartridge and our 30-day guarantee, it's a win-win situation for you and the San Diego environment.

The business case is growing for solution providers interested in addressing the environmental concerns of their customers

At a time when hybrid automobiles are becoming commonplace, and manufacturing executives go to Washington to push for tighter controls on greenhouse gases, printing and imaging solution providers may do well consider adding environmental expertise to their portfolios.

Applying green sensibilities to the printing infrastructure may not be a top priority for most customers, but hardware and software vendors say this area is gaining interest. The catalyst isn't solely environmental. Many end users are finding pragmatic financial incentives for going green.

The good news is that green printing requires changes primarily to messaging rather than a fundamental revision of business models. To workflow efficiency and security benefits add reduced paper consumption and lower consumables costs to the reasons why electronic document management systems make sense. "With electronic archiving and retrieval systems you can scan a document into an MFP [multifunction product]. Then you can route it electronically to the right people rather than printing three or four separate copies and hoping the right people will see it," says Scott Anderson, Hewlett-Packard's vice president of imaging and printing commercial channel sales.

Consumables management and recycling are strong reasons for end users to sign up for managed-services contracts. And solution providers may seal a tech-refresh deal by offering customers an environmentally friendly way to dispose of old printing-and-imaging hardware.

Hardware and software vendors are helping out with technologies that make it easy to address environmental concerns and costly waste.

Late last year start-up GreenPrint Technologies introduced a same-named application designed to help businesses reduce unnecessary output. When users hit the print command, a GreenPrint preview page appears that highlights sections or pages likely to end up as wasted print outs. This includes pages with Web page borders, short over runs of text, or boilerplate legal disclaimers. Users also have the option of making their own selections.

After users finalize their edits and continue with the print job, only the relevant pages move through the print queue. "There's a clear business case in terms of savings in paper, ink, and time," says Hayden Hamilton, GreenPoint founder.

He cites a study by Lexmark that looked at cross-industry printing practices and determined that a typical business user prints a total of 10,000 pages a year. Of these, 1100 a year, or six pages per day, are waste. "We extrapolated the numbers and estimated that business people generate about 80 billion wasted pages per year," Hamilton says.

He adds that comprehensive studies haven't determined how much ink and toner is wasted each year, but those areas also add unnecessary costs for businesses.

Although the company currently sells the software direct, Hamilton says he's exploring additional sales strategies and would welcome talks with solution providers.

The proprietary solid ink technology Xerox uses in its color printers and MFPs can also help solution providers deliver on green promises, says Mark Drum, the company's director of channel marketing for North American reseller sales. The ink "sticks" are non-toxic and because the technology doesn't rely on cartridges it produces 90 percent less waste than laser printing, according to Xerox.

(Source: printandimage.com)

Other cost cutting, paper saving tips can be found on our website at www.cwsandiego.com.

Michael S. Lasky at PC World has posted an article that could help reduce your printing expenses.

Printers are cheap to buy, but expensive to use. Printer vendors may think that their ink cartridges and special paper are worth their weight in gold, but that doesn't mean you can't print on the cheap. You just have to know a few simple tricks.

Preview to print less: When printing pages from a Web site, use your browser's Print Preview function to ensure that you're getting just the information you need. Even if the site has a printer-friendly option, Print Preview lets you make sure the right margin won't be cut off (some Web pages are too wide for many printers): If necessary, adjust your layout orientation from Portrait to Landscape to cover the lost territory.

In Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera, open the Web page you want to print and click File, Print Preview. A new screen will pop up with the content shown in printer format; it will likely fill more than a single printed page. Note the page or pages you want to print, and click the Print button at the top of the Preview screen (or press <Ctrl>-P). In the resulting Print dialog box, enter the start and end pages in the Print Range boxes (the Pages button will be selected automatically when you enter the page numbers).

Some printer makers, such as Canon, bundle free utilities with their printers -- or make programs available for download -- that let you print Web pages faster. Check your vendor's Web site for such a program, or visit Canon's Easy-WebPrint utility site.

To reduce your ink usage further, select the Properties button and choose Draft mode under Print Quality (the wording and location of these options vary from printer to printer; you may have to click around a bit in your Printer Properties dialog box to find them). If color is not important to you, also check the Grayscale Printing button. Finally, click OK.

Print just the text: My favorite way to print a small section of text from a Web site is to highlight the text, click File, Print, and choose Selection under Page Range. Alternatively, you could copy the relevant text (press <Ctrl>-C), open WordPad (click Start, All Programs, Accessories, Word-Pad, though any word processor or text editor will do), and paste the content there (select Edit, Paste Special, Unformatted Text). I usually have to do a quick format touch-up before I print, but I save quite a bit of ink and paper this way.

Skip the power strip: Do you switch your printer on and off from a power strip? Bad idea. When you shut a printer off, it parks its heads in a preconfigured place. But powering down via a power strip can bypass the normal shut-down process, preventing the heads from parking properly. This can dry the printhead out or cause it to clog. Always use your printer's own power switch to turn it off.

Prevent cartridge drying: Print cartridges have a nasty habit of drying out from disuse. Print a page (using your black and color cartridges) at least once a week to keep the cartridges fresh. There's no resuscitating a dried-up cartridge.

Know when to go off-brand: No-name printer cartridges are a few dollars cheaper than your printer manufacturer's refills, but the savings may come at the price of lower or inconsistent print quality. If you're printing drafts of text documents, off-brands can be a good choice. For printing photos, however, they generally produce fewer prints than brand-name cartridges do, and they fail to match the manufacturers' inks in print quality and fade resistance.

Refill kits may seem like a good way to cut printer costs; but they're messy, their print quality is inconsistent, and the refilled cartridge will hold less ink than a new cartridge from the original manufacturer will, which means fewer prints in the long run.

After being cited repeatedly by state regulators, they grudgingly admitted to having issues with the 17-acre site - but only small ones.

Then a base-commissioned study estimated it might cost $30 million to fix the $2.3 million dump, but also laid out plans for much cheaper repairs.

Now, the rocky history of Las Pulgas has hit a new low: The San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board is flatly rejecting Camp Pendleton's turnaround plan for the landfill. It's also suggesting permanent closure of the site because the problems might be unfixable.

The dump, situated near the base's central area, was expanded in 1999 to hold decades' worth of trash. But shoddy construction caused the landfill's liner to rupture in numerous places, forcing Marine officials to close the site in 2003.

Base leaders have spent about half a million dollars to trap and store hundreds of thousands of gallons of hazardous waste - including radioactive material and heavy metals - that have gushed from the landfill.

State regulators fear such runoff could pollute drinking-water wells and aquifers located just a few miles from the dump. They have described the landfill as the greatest engineering failure of its kind in San Diego County history.

Last year, the Marines paid $151,500 to the consulting firm Tetra Tech Inc. to complete its study on potential fixes. The company took seven months to finish the report.

In January, Camp Pendleton officials chose a $5.5 million repair proposal from the options Tetra Tech presented. They sought to spread a liner on top of the roughly 250,000 cubic yards of garbage already in the landfill. In theory, the new cover would prevent rainfall and other sources of water from filtering through the existing trash and leaking through the first liner.

Any hope that water board officials would endorse the base's plan died just two paragraphs into the agency's 19-page review.

"The (study) contains very significant deficiencies in the level of technical information. . . . (It) fails to comply with minimum requirements," said the document, which the board sent Friday to Camp Pendleton.

"They proposed something that they failed to provide rationale for," said John Odermatt, a senior engineering geologist for the water board.

In a statement, Camp Pendleton said it was "coordinating with (board officials) to address their concerns."

Camp Pendleton officials said they would comply with the mandate, although they didn't specify a timeline for doing so.

"In the end, I think they are going to find and fix all the (liner) holes or clean and close the landfill," Odermatt said. Both of these repair projects were at the higher end of Tetra Tech's price estimates.

Odermatt said the Marine Corps is immune to most forms of pressure normally exercised by the board, including fines. That's because the military and other federal agencies are exempt from certain environmental regulations.

In an extreme case, the water board could go to court and seek a cease-and-desist order that would prevent Camp Pendleton from operating the landfill.

(Source: SignOnSanDiego.com)