For Toronto real estate broker David Batori, direct mail is one of the best arrows in his marketing quiver. But as a two-person operation, he worried about the more than $2,000 a month he was spending outsourcing his printing needs.
The solution was to take about a third of it in-house and start printing his own materials, a feat he says has saved him $4,000 since he acquired a colour laser printer and includes the cost of acquisition, ink, paper and labour.
Many small and home businesses find that printing is a big part of their costs, and have turned to new technologies to both boost business and save on expenses.
For Mr. Batori, taking some of his printing in-house was possible because of the remarkable price drop in laser printing technology. Whereas laser printing had, until a couple of years ago, been the exclusive domain of large-scale enterprises, dramatic price drops have brought not just monochromatic lasers but also colour lasers below the $1,000 mark.
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Furthermore, the cost of ownership has similarly dropped with cartridges, which once cost several hundred dollars and now come in at about $150 to $200.
Mr. Batori prints about 2,000 pieces a month in-house and still uses the print shop for general orders where the economy of scale makes sense.
"I like to customize the piece for each neighbourhood, parks, schools, shopping and amenities," said Mr. Batori, a Remax broker in north Toronto who bought an HP LaserJet 3800 for $900.
"Some of what I send out is to keep my name top of mind in people's minds but some of my runs were so small -- less than 800 pieces -- it wasn't cost effective to send out to a printer."
Moving to colour was a matter of "professionalism and clarity" for Dr. Roger Stronell at the Kitchener Area Reproductive Medicine Associates (KARMA) clinic and the Mississauga Isis Regional Fertility Centre, which provide obstetrical and gynecological imaging services for other medical specialists.
"There's a certain professional panache in colour you don't have with black and white," said Dr. Stronell, an award winning early adopter of PC technology who notes with some regret that some radiologists are still using typewriters to produce their reports.
"But, aside from the letterhead, it's the ability to embed an image into the report and annotate it which is invaluable. We're dealing with specialists who are used to these images so it helps. There's a teaching and consulting function in one."
He said the image quality of the three laser printers his clinics have installed "approaches that of film. I like to joke with my IT guy that if a picture is worth 1,000 words, these are worth 1,024," referring to the fact that digital images are sized in multiples of eight.
The dropping cost of the technology has made it affordable, he said, and the result is a "significant step forward. It's the patients who benefit because they can have their issues dealt with quickly and clearly."
One of the fastest growth areas for technology is in printers and upgrading to more energy efficient units opens a lot of doors, says information technology research company IDC's Brad Hughes, cutting not just power bills but cost of ownership.
The fastest growing segment within printing is the all-in-one, also known as the Multi-Function Printer (MFP), which scans, prints, faxes and copies, where there's been strong growth year over year, Mr. Hughes says.
He says penetration of MFPs among small businesses will increase to 81.7 per cent in 2009 from 74.5 per cent in 2004 with about 6.3 million businesses plugged into such devices, up from 5.2 million. The advantages of the MFP is a saving in footprint and the cost of peripheral devices and that makes it a popular choice for small businesses, many of which operate from a home or in a location where space is at a premium.
Another key area has been the introduction of MFPs with network capability as a standard function, allowing several users to share the device for different purposes.
"This was technology that previously was only available to large enterprises," said Andrew Kiss, manager of marketing and communications for Lexmark Canada.
MFPs also integrate other technology, he said, allowing businesses to take advantage of technology to cut down on printing costs. For instance, faxes can be replaced by electronic documents like PDFs.
"You print the document, sign it, scan it using Adobe PDF Writer then e-mail it as an attachment directly to the person," he said.
Inkjets continue to hold a niche, he said, especially where high quality photographs are required, something laser printers don't do as well. But for those printing more than 500 pages a month, laser starts to present better value.
With a print management system, supplied with the printers, users can control the quality, eliminate printing of photographs for proof copies (cutting back on toner consumption) and get a preview to ensure their document and printer are aligned before hitting the button for 200 copies only to discover halfway through the process it's printing sideways.
"We also have a business ink jet, the K550 for about $229," said Jean-Paul Desmarais, business customer marketing manager for HP Canada, the dominant player in the printer market according to IDC. For small businesses that don't print a lot, Mr. Desmarais says, it will do the job and the unit is cheaper to operate because the print heads are not on the ink cartridges (unlike most consumer units, which are integrated, with replacement cartridges costing $50 to $75 each with much smaller ink reservoirs).
It matches laser quality speeds at 12 pages per minute (ppm) for black and up to 10 ppm for colour -- about twice the speed of colour laser at up to 30 per cent lower cost per page. It's also network compatible, both wired and wireless.
As projects or business demand more copies, each with more colour, there's a cost curve which rises with the amount of colour on each page and how effective the printer is at pumping out pages.
A job with 20-per-cent colour coverage (about 20 per cent of the page has colour images such as graphs or graphics) for 1,000 copies costs about 28 cents a page for inkjet, close to 50 cents a page at a print shop, but as low as eight cents for a top-of-the-line HP Laserjet 9500 or Xerox Phaser 7760, though both are expensive at $6,000 to $8,000, depending on options. A more modest HP Color LaserJet 2600n, which retails at $350, Xerox 6120 for about $500 or Lexmark 510n at about $430, will churn pages out for between 13 and 16 cents each.
The only downside for the explosion in colour graphics appears to be that, for every advance in printing technology and desktop software packages comes another challenge: Entrepreneurs now must wrestle with issues most likely outside their core skills, such as graphic design.
"Technology has certainly changed the real estate industry, with cell phones, and digital cameras," said Mr. Batori, who has been a realtor for 17 years.
"Typically, back in the late 80s, it was a black-and-white photocopy. Today is really about getting to the emotions. Colour brings that home to buyers. If they're seeing 10 to 15 homes with a realtor in a day and they have material they can take with them to make them remember, it really helps clear the confusion."
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