Equipment Suppliers Proclaim Color King

Forget the frilly stuff and mahogany. Office furnishings have another upscale category that’s bringing “bling bling” to the work place.

High-end office equipment — namely printers, scanners, copiers, facsimiles and the latest hybrids of all four — is evolving toward value-added document management. They’ll scan-to-fax, image documents, e-mail PDFs and enlarge or shrink them into glossy prints for folded, saddle-stitched booklets all in four-color splendor.

Companies want business machines that will do it all, area office suppliers said.

But instead of paying exorbitant sums to multitask at record speed, technology is actually making the ubiquitous office machine more affordable even for small businesses.

Chris Meyer is the Northwest Arkansas sales manager for Professional Business Systems Inc. in Rogers, an office equipment supplier with 1,600 customers in the area. He said it used to be that color-capable printing would cost companies two to three times the amount of traditional black-and-white printing.

Now, it’s only about a 20 percent difference, and that margin is apparently small enough for companies to spring for the extra zip that color can lend.

“Right now, color is the thing,” Meyer said. “Even your per-page costs for color used to be about 20 to 30 cents per page. Now a lot of machines are getting that down to six to eight cents per. The companies that couldn’t afford it before because they did a lot of volume, now it’s making sense to them and they want it.”

Meyer said at PBS, a Konica Minolta and Kyocera dealer, the Minolta Biz Hub Z350 is the hottest product. It’s a black-and-white copier that can scan and run color at the push of a button. It starts around $14,000 retail and tops $20,000 with more bells and whistles.

“It used to be only some of the big marketing firms we handle might need all the capabilities of a machine like this,” Meyer said. “But a church in Siloam Springs recently upgraded to one because of all it will do.”

Tim Stanley, president and owner of Xerox dealer Total Document Solutions Inc. in Fayetteville, said the difference in color printing has come down to the cost of one ink cartridge per month. For what’s often a $35 upgrade, he said, it’s a no-brainer.

“Scanning to e-mail is now as simple as sending a fax,” said Stanley, whose business serves about 1,000 customers in Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas River Valley. “Networking is where it can become a can of worms if you don’t know what you’re doing, but the software is coming so strong and the equipment is no longer the cumbersome copier that used to take up half the break room.

“My job in this market is to destroy and obliterate the myth that [Xerox] only has big equipment, and to crush the idea that we’re too expensive. All that’s changed.”

Stanley’s biggest demand of late has been for Xerox’s WorkCenter M 24, another black-and-white printer with touch-color and scanning features. It starts at $8,099 retail.

Charles Hanna, vice president of AAA Business Systems Inc. in Fayetteville, also sells Konica Minolta and agreed the Biz Hub unit has been his biggest draw. His firm serves about 1,500 customers in Northwest Arkansas.

Hanna said the most functional units are being installed on networks, but the one problem that can arise is overload. With one unit or print engine doing all of the faxing, receiving and copying, if an engine goes down the customer could hit a logjam.

“That’s why service is such an important part of this industry,” Hanna said. “That’s what does and will continue to separate our businesses.”