I'd price out the rental of a Savin or other networked color digital copier.
If the muckety-mucks are worried about privacy/confidentiality, units like this offer management options like passcodes for print jobs (must put in a passcode at the printer to print the document if it's confidential, or put a passcode in when requesting the print job from the PC if it's color or it goes into th bitbucket, etc.) Might be able to make the economic case with something like that. Kurt On 1/29/08, Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Howdy list, > > So, after some truly abysmal tech support experiences with HP this > month, I've decided it's time to look at other printer brands. I've > been buying HP's almost exclusively for over a decade, so I'm starting > from scratch. There are so many brands that even a product field > survey is non-trivial: Dell, Samsung, Canon, Epson, IBM/Lexmark, > Xerox, Ricoh, Sharp, Toshiba, Panasonic, just to name a few. > Recommendations? Opinions? Horror stories? > > Relatively small company, roughly 75 workstations. Mostly > monochrome laser printers serving workgroups of 5-10 people. Typical > volume might be 1K-3K pages/month. A couple color laser printers > serving supersets of same. > > A few bigwigs have color inkjets in their office, because of course > they're too important to have to walk out to the printer in the hall, > but they also don't want to clutter up their fancy mahogany office > furniture with a larger laser printer that might actually work. For > example, the Director of HR. Since she works with personal/private > stuff, she wanted one of those print/scan/copy/fax jobs (reasonable, I > guess). The supposedly high-end HP inkjet we bought has been a > disaster, which is why I'm here. > > Almost every printer we have is network-attached (easier to manage, > they roam with the user profile if hardware is changed, enables the > frequent requests to share printers). As I recall from some > experience a few years ago, that seems to be a common failing with > many brands. Even if they have a network jack, functionality/features > are severely reduced over the network. > > One thing I really dislike is printers which require special > software installation to the tune of hundreds of megabytes, a few > startup programs, a dozen desktop icons, and their own support, > update, and maintenance hassles. Windows has APIs for printing and > scanning; if we stick to those, support and training are so much > easier. > > Thoughts? > > -- Ben > > ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~ > ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
