How to cut your school printing costs in half!
Here at EcoPrinters, we’re committed to sharing the secrets of how you can beat the printer manufacturers at their own game and rack up thousands of pounds in savings for your school!
Printers don’t make money, consumables do, so let’s dive straight in and look at how you can slash what you’re spending on ink cartridges and toners.
How schools are charged for print consumables
When you sign up for a school printing contract, you’ll be asked how many pages you expect to print each year. Using your estimation, the supplier will give you a quote to cover the cost of the printers and your consumables, but there’s one problem with this. The supplier is using the 5% page coverage rule and this is something schools never meet.
“How many pages can a single ink cartridge / toner print?” is probably the most common question in the printing industry, and long ago commercial print suppliers (printers leased and sold into businesses) set about answering this question for good.
The answer to this question rests on how ink is used on the page, and this will vary greatly depending on what you’re printing. A short letter will use very little ink, while a full colour photograph will use a lot.
As the contents of prints out vary, it becomes very difficult to give an accurate answer to how many pages can a single cartridge produce unless you have an approximation to work from. This is what commercial print suppliers looked to solve and the 5% coverage rule was born as a result. 5% ink coverage of an A4 page equates to a half-page printed letter (using black ink only) in size 12 font. It doesn’t include any colour or any pictures, and for schools this is where the issue begins.
Why printing imagery costs you a lot more
In the commercial world, almost all the printouts are letters and reports. At most you might have a graph or two, but images and photographs are rare, so the 5% rule works quite well for businesses.
However, when you’re looking at your school printing requirements, the majority of output is from teachers printing classroom resources. Effective learning content needs to be engaging for students, and half-page letters just aren’t going to cut it. Teachers need to print colourful imagery, photographs and illustrations to support their lessons.
However, printing full colour illustrations uses a lot more ink per page, so you won’t be surprised to learn that the 5% page coverage rule doesn’t hold in schools. The typical page coverage in your school might be nearly to 15% which means you’re going to need 3x as many ink cartridges / toners as you budgeted for, driving up your printing spend considerably.
School printing made easy - unlimited printing
Now that you understand how page coverage works, you see that what works in the commercial world doesn’t work for schools. We believe the same, and we don’t think that the limitations of your existing school printing solution should dictate what you can or can’t create for your students.
We’ve done away with the headaches of page coverage equations by developing a unique ink recycling technology. This means we can give you unlimited full colour printing for a single annual price.
Worried about going over your budget? Forget it. Tired of imposing unpopular printing limits on your staff? Make it a thing of the past! With EcoPrinters you pay once and print as much as you like.
Today, over 100 schools have joined EcoPrinters within 95% telling us they have saved a significant amount of money as a result. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch and we’ll give you a quote for unlimited, full colour school printing in less than 15 minutes.
