The Best Color Copier | Tips on Buying

The copier market is flooded with color copiers and printers.  All manufacturers are now producing more color copiers and printers than ever before and these sales easily surpass black and white copiers.  Hence, the overall costs of "color printing" has dropped dramatically over the past several years.

Digital copying and printing

Digital copying and printing is often cheaper and more efficient compared the gold standard of the printing press.  A printing press offers the best in printing quality and variation.  Colors can be accurately matched, inks are selected based upon the print medium/material (paper, metal, stone, wood, etc.) and press printing allows you to work with virtually any size project.   You can select from an extensive selection of colors and shades, including PMS colors, considered to be superior with CMYK when it comes to matching colors and hues.   In short, press printing produces very accurate and long lasting products, but at a price.

The color copiers and printers produce what is known in the copier industry as “Business Colors” and is not to be compared with color from a printing press.  A printing press might be used for producing calendars or flyers. These are two totally different processes, but for most small office/home office (SOHO) print jobs, digital is easier, quicker and cheaper.

Kyocera Color Copiers

As you can expect, digital "business color" copiers differ widely between manufacturers and models.  For instance, most color copiers produce 600 x 600 dpi (dots-per-inch) copies, whereas Kyocera produces a standard 1200 x 1200 dpi print resolution.

In addition to printing at a higher resolution, Kyocera color copiers use our patented micro-toners and our industry leading patented ceramic drums.  The result?  Kyocera produces not just a superior print/copy quality, but consistent quality.

The key word here is “consistent”. Virtually any copier will produce good copy quality when new, but will this quality last?

Testing Color Quality

Here is how to find out:

Copy/Print a Color image when the copier is new. Then Copy/Print the same image 6 months, 9 months and even 1 year later, and then compare them. Unless you have a Kyocera coper, the images will be different.  The Kyocera copiers will consistently produce more vibrant, sharper and  better focused documents.

Some colors are hard to copy, such marks made by yellow or blue highlights and the variations of these colors. However, Kyocera Copiers “see” and produce them better than other copiers available.

However, if the majority of your copying includes copying/printing pictures with high resolution either B&W or color, I would not recommend purchasing a color copier as the copier will use excess toner, which will eventually cause toner build up at the fuser section and this among other things, will cause misfeeds and probably damage the fuser section. This is one of the reasons why we refer to color and “Business Color”.   It is ok if you copy/print pictures with high resolution on a very limited bases, but not on a consistent basis.