[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Xerox?s 'Breakthrough' Solid Ink Color Printers: Should You Care? here

[OldGuyCA]

What about energy consumption? I would expect a system that melts the wax-like colors to put them on the page to use a lot of electricity, a lot more than an inkjet.

[xeroid]

This machine will certainly use more electricity than an injet. Where can you get an injet that will do 85 pages a minute, run on soy based inks and have virtually no consumable waste. How much money does HP make with all those injet cartridges piling up in offices all over the world, Billions. And how much oil and electricity is used to run the plants, make the product, ship the product, and dispose of all the waste, compared to solid ink, the numbers are huge. And dont think that all those HP cartridges get recycled, most end up in landfills. This product will save the environment, and a ton money for the right customer. Yes I work for Xerox, in service for 25 years. This is the future of office color.

Steve

[SilverSTreak]

I used, both personally and professionally several iterations of these printers for several years and my advice is STAY AWAY.

I chose these printers for two reasons: Duty cycle and quality, and they did deliver on both. I had been trying to use ink jets, but at the volumes I was doing the ink heads just wore out requiring new ones every few months. That made it expensive. The Phaser series I replaced the ink jets with was speedy enough, and the quality was supurb (I was doing full-color newsletters complete with pictures).

However, there was another side of this "coin": COST and RELIABILITY. Because the solid ink needs to be heated in order to transfer onto the pages, you need to keep the printers ON all the time. Yes, you could shut them off, but each time you turn them on and the ink is heated up, the printers go through an initilization process - part of which purges some ink through the print heads. This uses a surprisingly $$$ amount of $$$ ink. Moreover, if you are in a location where power interruptions are frequent, you'd better have them on UPS's (and BIG ones at that due to the wattage of the heaters) or you can go through hundreds of dollars of ink in a very short time just due to on-off cycles. IF you kept the units power protected andON all the time, you could minimize such losses, BUT - I had problems with the plastic parts (MOST of the printer is made out of plastics) degrading over time (IMHO due to heat from being on constantly) and the costs for repairs reulted in my owning very expensive boat anchors or light stands. Even with careful management of the power cycles and well air conditioned environment the cost of running these was, in the end, even higher that the ink jets including frequent head replacements.



I am now using laser printers which though more expensive to operate than ink jet, are still far less expensive to operate than the solid ink Phasers.

[aaronaaron]

XEROID, (edited to remove personal attack)

This message was edited to remove a personal attack that is against Community Standards. Please refer to the Community Standards: http://forums.pcworl.../docs/DOC-1000.
Message was edited by: smax013

[RNR19952]

Inkjets are 5 times the cost of laser, easily
Xerox solid ink technology was obtained through the purchase of Techtronics
Depending on your needs the solid inks give a better representation of what's is on the screen, for instance I have a customer that is a Cardiologist, The Phaser 8600 series is their printer of choice when looking at pics of your heart, these pictures are impressive, but yes the printer is always on, but then again almost every printer I see is always on. Laser toners are a carcinogenic, and some of the latest ploys by the manufacturers is to discourage remanufacturing by third parties. IMHO not much in this industry is "green".

[ThomSoCalHP]

Like Xeroid and SilverSTreak said, solid ink printers use a LOT of energy. The Xerox Phaser 8560mfp uses 3 times more power than the HP Color LaserJet CM4730mfp. And this is based on the Xerox machine going into sleep mode after 4 hours – these power consumption figures would sky-rocket if a customer chooses to keep the device in full power mode 24 hours a day.
Waste is inherent in the solid ink product design. Each time the device is powered off, the ink sticks cool down and the nozzles need to be cleaned before it can print again. The only way to avoid this cleaning cycle is to leave the device in full power mode 24 hours a day, which wastes an incredible amount of energy.
HP is well-known for being committed to sustainability and the environmental impact of printing. See what the press had to say after a recent tour of the HP inkjet cartridge recycling facility: http://www.printerco....asp?newsID=445

[Evildave]

I have a different kind of waste with an inkjet printer.
My Brother MFC inkjet gets used for maybe 50 pages of mostly black & white text a year.

The ink reservoirs are all 'empty' within a year. It costs 50 dollars to replace all the ink.

That's a dollar a page.

Where, oh where does the ink go?

Mostly squirted into a sponge to keep it 'ready' to print at all times with 2:00am self cleaning cycles. If I unplug it, it always makes up for lost time and squirts tons of extra ink.

Oh, and it won't send a FAX, scan a document, or print black & white if ANY color is 'out', and by 'out' I mean half full, but the printer decided it was 'empty'.

Well, it looks like I'll be buying a black & white MFC laser printer soon. After all, it will only cost about twice as much as replacing my ink cartridges does, and I will need toner... pretty much never. At least never another toner cartridge after I run through the 'starter' cartridge. 50 pages a year, 5,000 pages capacity... I'll be 142 years old before I need another cartridge. The printer will fall apart before it needs more toner.

Laser printers and copiers left on 24/7 'hot' mode also consume outrageous amonts of power. They all set the toner to paper with heat, and keeping that heating element hot is ruinous. I just leave it off unless I need it. Most of them are 'smart' enough to turn off all the high power parts and nap until something happens. You'll wait an extra couple of seconds for the first page on a 'modern' printer, but that's it.