Colour printing in the office

We put in some new printers a little while ago at the office. Usually that's nothing special. Stuff doesn't work for a couple of hours while they get the IP and printer name and such set up then business as usual.

But it was a bit different this time. We now have colour printing in the office for the first time. And it's great. I like to print code and it's great being able to get the same printout as is on my screen. So I'm really enjoying it.

It makes sense to have colour printing. Our monitors are in colour, powerpoints are colour, so you would logically expect to print in the same colour as you get on the screen. Plus we've had colour printing in our cheap home printers as completely standard for like 10 years now.

So why has it taken so long for colour printing to arrive in the office. Some history might be useful here. Back around 1997-1998 at PRIOR Data there was this Y2K project for the military. PRIOR was providing office space and some services and staff to a group who were doing this huge Y2K readiness project for the military, checking the readiness of all kinds of stuff like elevator systems and whatever else they could think of that might fail.

They were mostly downstairs from the main PRIOR office on Spring Garden Road. As part of Y2K they were producing a lot of documentation of course. And there was a rumour they had this special printer called 'Howe' that was a big HP machine that cost $27,000. And it had double sided printing.

It made sense for them for their project and the amount of documents they had to produce. For the rest of us upstairs we asked the sysadmin once in a while about double sided printing. The response was usually something like "that's really expensive; we would need to install special hardware kits on our printers; we would need to install special drivers on everyone's PCs". There was a perception that double sided printing was an exotic thing that was too difficult and expensive to make widely available.

But by 2001 when I joined Core it was just there, completely standard, even on the cheap Lexmark office printers. Double sided printing was just something that came out on the next generation of printers and it didn't cost any more when getting new printers to get double sided [although you saved a fortune on printer paper] so that was that. And we've had double sided without thinking about it for years now.

For a long time colour printing was where double sided was around 1997-1998. People were suspicious that the cost per sheet was too high. It was perceived as unnecessary. Plus colour printing was a status symbol, a perq of the important and powerful who had access too it.

But I think going forward when businesses go to replace their existing workhorse office printers they will find that colour is no longer an exotic expensive option just for the executive level. It will just be standard and the cost per page will be the pretty much same as the legacy dinosaur black and white printers. The employees will be very happy with it. Colour printing at work is great.