Office printers and copiers are the shared machines that print, copy and scan documents in an office. Most office machines today are multifunction printers (MFPs): one machine that prints, copies, scans and sometimes faxes. A copier is, in practice, a large MFP with a scanner on top.
How does an office printer put a page on paper? Most office machines are laser printers. A laser draws the page as a pattern of electric charge on a rotating drum. The charged areas of the drum pick up toner, a very fine black or coloured powder. The drum presses the toner onto the paper, and a heated roller called the fuser melts it in place. That is why pages come out warm. An inkjet printer works differently: it sprays tiny drops of liquid ink onto the paper. Offices mostly prefer laser printers, because they are fast and their pages of text cost less.
How do printer makers earn? They often sell the printer at a low price and earn over the following years from toner and ink. Each toner cartridge carries a small chip that tells the printer the cartridge's type and how much toner is left. Many homes and small offices in India buy ink tank printers instead. These are refilled from bottles of ink, cost more to buy, and cost much less for each page.
Take, for example, a chartered accountant's office in Ahmedabad with 12 staff. It buys a black-and-white laser MFP for about ₹30,000. A toner cartridge costs about ₹6,000 and prints about 3,000 pages, so each page costs about ₹2 in toner. The office prints about 3,300 pages a month on average, and far more during the tax-filing months. Over three years, it prints about 1,20,000 pages and spends about ₹2.4 lakh on toner. That is eight times the price of the printer.
A printer is also a small computer on the office network. Its firmware drives the motors, the laser and the fuser, and runs its touch screen and network connection. Print jobs reach it from laptops through the office's switches and routers. Because a printer is a computer, its firmware needs security updates, like a laptop's. Many companies also run print management software. It holds each job until the employee taps an ID card at the printer, so confidential pages do not lie in the tray. It also counts the pages printed by each department.
Scanning matters as much as printing. An employee scans a signed contract, and the MFP sends it to an email address or into the company's enterprise content management (ECM) system, where documents are stored and kept for as long as the rules require. Scanned supplier invoices can go to intelligent document processing (IDP), which reads the invoice number, the GST amount and the total from each page. Print shops that must match colours exactly check their output with colour measurement instruments.
Large companies often stop buying printers altogether. They pay for each page under managed print services instead.