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Kevin McLauchlan wondered: <<laser printing and color laser printing have
grown up with, and as part of, the computer
industry. Why d'you suppose color printing is still so expensive?>>
If you're talking color offset printing, the answer is simple: you have to
pass through a press four times, rather than once if you're using a single
color of ink. Worse yet, because you are overlaying patterns of ink dots to
create colors, you need really good (thus expensive) proofs to confirm that
the colors you expect are the colors you get, and you need an expensive
press to ensure the alignment is acceptable.
If you're talking laser printing, the problem is different: laser printers
and even high-volume color copiers are dead slow compared with printing
presses, and will always remain slower; you can't make a desktop machine as
mechanically robust as something that fills an entire room. Same problem for
inkjet printers, only worse, because the technology is inherently much
slower than laser printing (e.g., printing an inch of the page's width at a
time rather than the full width of the page).
In either case, you'll never match a commercial printer's prices at home
(for large jobs) because they can buy paper and ink by the trainload, and
thus get much better prices than you can. On the other hand, short-run
printing at home (less than 500 copies) is probably cheaper if you've got
the patience to wait for the output.
<<The quotes we get for X number of pages have not changed much in years>>
Doesn't that mean the prices have actually dropped? Inflation and all
that... <g>
<<Yet it is still prohibitively expensive to use colo[u]r in a manual at
less than 50,000 copies.>>
You'll never overcome the (roughly) fourfold cost difference between a
single pass and the four passes required for full color. You can make the
process more efficient, but the fundamental difference remains.
<<When color laser printers finally break the home-PC price barrier (as
black'n'white lasers did, several years ago), should I finally expect to be
able to print my manuals in color (400 pages, and a couple of hundred copies
per revision)??>>
Maybe. <g>
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my
telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my
telephone."--Bjarne Stronstrup (originator of C++ programming language)
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