As modern technology progresses even further towards to unknown, many people have begun to feel the heyday of the office photocopier has all but passed. We have such brilliantly reliable printers these days that using one of those dated machines seems almost pointless. At a time when ink was expensive, and speed was of the essence, these machines provided almost every office in the world with a means of replicating documents in seconds, which obviously had many advantages. However, today they’ve become an almost unused piece of furniture clogging up the corners of of many work spaces.
Even so, these machines have played a big role in getting us to where we are, and millions of people all over the world do still use them from time to time. With that in mind, this article will take you through some of the basic positive and negative effects of keeping a photocopier in your premises for all staff members to use. Hopefully, then we’ll know for sure if they’ve had their day.
Positive: Cheap Toner
You will still pay quite a lot of money for ink cartridges, no matter what you do to reduce the cost. Some companies buy refillables, and while these do work out slightly cheaper, they can never contend with the toner on a photocopier. Indeed, standard ink cartridges for small printers can usually manage somewhere in the region of 500 pages, but photocopiers can sometimes knock out thousands of pages without any replacements whatsoever.
Positive: Low Maintenance
In most instances, photocopiers are very sturdy, and while printers might get jammed with paper etc, the older option tends to plough through no matter no many sheets you ask it to replicate. While there is some maintenance to be done every six months or so, they’re generally far more reliable and simple to fix than the standard modern office printer.
Negative: Bulky
There can be no denying that photocopiers are incredibly bulky, and this is one of the reasons why more business owners are purchasing smaller, more efficient machines from firms that specialise in printing services.
Negative: Poor Quality
No matter how expensive your standalone photocopier may be, it’s never going to produce the same quality paperwork as you would get from a printer. Indeed, even printers that come with a photocopying feature included produce a far higher quality of document. This might not be an issue when copying workers information, but you wouldn’t want to use one to copy letters you’re sending out to clients.
So, as you can see from that information, there are a number of positive and negative effects from using a standard, traditional photocopier. That said; they’ve done so much to get us to where we are, that leaving them behind now would seem somewhat heartless. Is there a place for photocopiers in the offices of the future? Unfortunately, it’s not looking good, but that doesn’t mean we won’t move onto more advanced tech that does the job better.
As the old saying goes “every cloud has a silver lining”.
