Defeating the Desktop Menace

It's also a big waste of money.

Vic Barkin, manager of Northern Arizona University Printing and Reproduction Services, tells the story of one NAU department that bought a desktop color printer and used it for jobs with offset-like run lengths.

"They needed to produce 10,000 color copies, and they did it all in-house, and it took forever," says Barkin. "On a laser printer, they paid somewhere around 30 to 60 cents apiece for supplies alone based on 30-percent coverage. I estimate that $2,000 was wasted on that project."