Printers as cost-cutting solutions

Calculating the cost per page, reducing electricity consumption, and a more efficient use of paper are only a few of the functions included in new standard printer models. Thus, peripheral equipment producers are changing their strategy, to delivering complete office supply solutions, in which the hardware component is secondary, to meeting the needs of business clients to cut costs, given the current economic downturn.

"Printers are not sexy, they don't sell like laptops or phones. Before, you didn't know what type of printer you had until you took it in for servicing, when it was broken, or when you disassembled it to see what kind of cartridge you had. Now, however, solutions included matter increasingly more, especially for business clients," said Daniel Stefan, Branch Manager of Lexmark International Technology Romania.

Lexmark International, one of the largest printer producers worldwide, introduced a series of printers on the local market which include an ethernet card for internet connection, as well as a wireless modem, to ease data transfer between peripheral devices and the computer. Among the current trends of the printer market, Stefan mentions easy connectivity, compact sizes, rapid transition between digital and printed documents, and information security, offered by limiting access through the use of a card or PIN. "The first generation of buyers has been exhausted. Most clients are now replacing their equipment, this is not their first purchase, and they are more demanding about the products they acquire. For example, many users are reluctant to switch to a colour printer, due to costs involved.

This is why we had to find a way to optimize the resource consumption of colour printers, to make these attractive in terms of price and operating costs," Stefan added. The local printer market plunged over 60 percent in the first six months of this year, according to data provided by the IDC market research company, quoted by Lexmark officials. "We felt no rebound of the market in the second half of this year," the Lexmark official said.

standard.money.ro