Black-and-white Copiers The Plain Truth

Despite the growth in color printing, black-and-white copiers still produce much of the work

in today's in-plants.

By W. Eric Martin

With all the new and improved digital goodness popping up in these pages, it's easy to overlook the advances made in those unappreciated machines of yore: ye olde black-and-white copiers.

These printing mainstays might not be the most exciting machines an in-plant manager can add to his or her arsenal, but they can't be discounted entirely because sometimes they're still the best tool for the job.

What's more, today's models bear little resemblance to the faulty, all-too-easily broken machines that most people associate with black-and-white copiers.

As many managers can attest, black-and-white copiers are still producing tons of work that's read all over.

Small Jobs Are Jobs Nonetheless

Work orders come in all shapes and sizes, forever frustrating in-plant managers' desires for efficiency and speed. But since you're unlikely to convince customers to stick to only one size of order, you need machines that can handle jobs that would be too time-consuming to print with offset lithography and digital duplicators.

"A lot of our assignments are classroom-size," says Carson C. Bartels, coordinator of Central Print Services in Iowa's Waterloo Community School District. "A teacher might send 110 originals and want seven copies of each. If three teachers gang together, that might be 60 copies and go on offset, but one teacher going her own way automatically creates two smaller jobs"—jobs that inevitably find their way to Bartels' Canon IR8500 or Xerox DC265.

With only four full-time employees and an operating budget just under $300,000, Central Print Services processes more than 27,000 work orders each fiscal year, producing over 20 million impressions. Approximately 18 percent of those impressions—roughly 4 million—come off black-and-white copiers.

The in-plant routes incoming orders requesting 1 to 15 copies to the Xerox (which clocks in at 65 copies per minute), and order sizes from 16 to 50 copies to the Canon (85 cpm). This not only helps distribute the work more evenly within the shop, it keeps monthly click counts within the right range to maximize the contracts with each company.

Is there any chance of convincing teachers to file their jobs digitally? Not likely, says Bartels: "They keep hard copy of the things they need year after year, and they would have to scan all of that for us to be able to produce digital copies." For a project that large and time-consuming, they would need a special grant from the school district to hire someone to scan pages throughout the summer.

"The niche that the black-and-white copiers fill could not be handled any other way efficiently or effectively," says Bartels. "I can't imagine operating without them."

Down in Owensboro, Kentucky, Nancy French finds herself in the same situation at the Owensboro Medical Health System.

"We print a lot of physician orders and chart forms, with most of these runs being less than 100 copies of two-sided forms," says French, supervisor of the Printing & Graphic Design department. "We also run a lot of work for the emergency department that's two-sided. These departments just don't have the room to store lots of forms."

All of these forms are handled by French's Ricoh 1105, which prints up to 105 CPM. The Ricoh also turns out copies of a frequently updated patient guide that runs 36 to 40 pages.

"We run those on the Ricoh, since they can be sent from there to a booklet maker that we can attach," says French, who employs four full-time workers and operates on a budget less than $200,000.

Copy Or Print?

Unlike the copiers of old, which produced work that clearly looked like a copy, today's black-and-white copiers can almost match presses in print quality. In addition to the Ricoh, Nancy French uses a Canon Imagerunner 550 (55 cpm) to print 1,000 copies of an employee newsletter each week.

"We print directly onto an 8x17˝ shell that's preprinted in two colors, then fold the copies," she says. "The copy quality is so good, and the cost per copy so cheap, that it would be silly to use a laser printer." The Imagerunner is also used to print recipe books into which color sheets are inserted.

Bartels seconds the low cost of black-and-white copiers, pointing out that exclusive of paper, copies on his Canon IR8500 run less than seven-tenths of a cent each and copies on the Xerox DC265 approach six-tenths of a cent.

The improvement in copy quality has resulted largely from the switch from analog to digital copiers.

"Analog has gone by the wayside," says Rodney Brown, graphics manager at the Graphic Communications Center of the University of Delaware, in Newark, Del. "The copy quality is so much better on digital than analog; you can get exceptionally good black-and-white quality."

Bartels, who last had an analog copier more than five years ago, says the digital models are more reliable, with downtime averaging less than one day per month.

"There were so many manual systems on the analog that they were really prone to breaking down," he says. "When the images are stored digitally, there's very little movement of the original."

The modular design of today's black-and-white copiers allows for easy replacement of parts when they do malfunction. Says Bartels, "You just call the service area and they tell you which module to replace."

Don't Leave Work Without Them

Black-and-white copiers aren't flashy, but that doesn't mean just any machine will do. You still need to compare, contrast and consider the contracts.

Brown, who uses three Konica 7085s (85 cpm) in the University's satellite copy centers, says the machines do everything a print manager could possibly want.

"When we were going for more speed, they were the only thing that had all the functions we were looking for: Collating, stapling, saddle-stitching, folding, larger paper trays," he says. "Being able to go four-up or eight-up is great, and they're networkable."

Although she might like a copier that runs a bit faster, French says she would purchase the same machines again because they offer all the space she needs. "We handle real short runs of NCR on the 550 in two 8-1⁄2x11˝ trays," she says, "and on the Ricoh we have four 8-1⁄2x11˝ trays, one 8-1⁄2x14˝ and one 11x17˝."

Monthly Usage Rates

Bartels finds that he looks first at monthly usage rates since speed is worth nothing if the machine burns out from the heady pace.

"The monthly specs on the Canon IR8500, for example, are 300,000 to 400,000," he says, whereas monthly impressions actually run about 275,000. "I always look for a monthly usage rate slightly higher that what we need."

Brown—who with 26 full-time employees and an operating budget of $3 million knows a thing or two about size—agrees with that notion.

"Buy larger than smaller because you're always going to increase in size," he says.

As for negotiating contracts, Brown says never forget who has the leverage; after all, there are a lot of vendors eager to serve your needs.

"If you play hardball, you can come out with good pricing structures with lots of copies included within," he says.