Xerox looks to make color printing more affordable

NEW YORK — The economics of color printing in many big offices are simple: A page of black and white costs about 2 cents per page, while color runs about 8 cents.

That’s one reason why only 15 percent of the 2.25 trillion pages printed worldwide each year are in color.

Xerox Corp. is hoping to upend that math — and its competition in the printing business — partly with the help of new technology.

The company is unveiling a printer Thursday — the ColorQube — that uses a waxy substance resembling a huge crayon instead of ink or toner cartridges.

The technology previously had been used in smaller Xerox printers. But the company says cost savings from its next-generation machine allow it to cut prices.

Xerox leases big multifunction printers to companies and charges them by the page — usually the standard 2 cents for black and white and 8 cents for color.

The new printer offers tiered pricing based on how much color ink a given printing job uses. Adding a small graphic or color accent to company stationery, for instance, would only cost a penny per page. More color will cost 3 cents and full color pages, 8 cents.

On the whole, Xerox says that means a 62 percent drop in the cost of color printing.

“There is a fundamental barrier that we were trying to break,” says Ursula Burns, the company’s president. “The world is in color, that’s what our customers want.”

Green is one color in particular Xerox is pushing with the new machine. The company says it produces less waste and less power than average laser printers.

Coming out with such a printer carries risks for the Norwalk, Conn.-based company. After all, many of the color machines Xerox is looking to render obsolete are Xerox machines.

“The trick is to make sure that it doesn’t just displace the laser jets,” said Angele Boyd, an analyst with the research firm IDC. Xerox will have to try to appeal to a wider market and steal share from competitors, perhaps by touting its green credentials.

Hewlett-Packard Co., one of Xerox’s main rivals, is skeptical. Tom Codd, an HP vice president, said the solid ink printers already on the market have produced images of lesser quality than standard laser printers; colors fade and leave a waxy residue on the page that’s hard to write over. And because solid ink machines have to keep the ink heated, they have tended to use more power.

Xerox concedes that quality and power use have been problems in the past. But the company says it has smoothed out the kinks.

The ColorQube does indeed have to keep its ink heated, said Jim Rise, Xerox vice president in charge of solid ink. Some is kept in a “molten” state, which means using more power than a laser machine when it’s idle.

But Rice says the printer more than makes up the difference by using less power while it’s running.

Xerox shares were up 1 cent at $6.70 in morning trading.