Duty Cycle Is Confusing!

Why Duty Cycle Is Confusing

Duty cycle is a part of every printer specification, and it’s often discussed as one of the main criteria you should use when deciding which printer to buy. Many buyer’s guides will tell you quite plainly that duty cycle reports the workload a printer is designed to handle. However, when you read that the mid-range printer you’ve been considering has a duty cycle of 200,000 pages per month, you might wonder what’s going on. Either you’ve been shopping for more printer power than you really need or that number is fishy.

If you’ve browsed several printer models you’ll know that the stated duty cycle for a given printer is a rather big number, tens or hundreds of thousands of pages per month. The vendors will tell you that a printer's duty cycle represents the amount of use the printer is designed to handle, measured in "maximum" pages printed per month. The cheapest laser models promise 8,000 pages per month and a typical workgroup printer may claim a 250,000-page monthly limit. If you were to match your real estimated monthly print volume to their duty cycle numbers, you’d rarely need anything more than a $250 printer!

Basically, the stated duty cycle, or maximum monthly volume, is a disclaimer figure for the vendor. There is no industry standard for duty cycle, so one vendor’s figures can sufficiently vary from another’s so that it isn't useful to compare across vendor lines. However if you’re comparing models from one company, the duty cycle figures can give you a sense of how much through-put one model can take compared to another.

Duty cycle is a number that’s based on stress testing of the printer. It's an upper-limit print volume that’s generally many, many higher than the amount you will print on that model. The duty cycle doesn’t take into account the practical limitations of a particular machine — the print speed, paper tray capacity, toner or ink capacity, and memory. It only measures the total amount of work the non-replaceable components can withstand.

So when you're evaluating different printers for your business, you should steadfastly ignore the duty cycle figure. Instead, make your best guess as to your office’s monthly print volume, and take that information to the vendors. When the salesperson recommends an $800 model with a 100,000-page monthly print volume, understand that customers typically print 5 percent, perhaps up to 10 percent, of a printer's stated duty cycle.

How can you tell whether you’re being sold more printer than you really need? Instead of puzzling over the stated duty cycle, you can run a few other numbers and follow a couple general rules to determine whether a particular printer is suited to the volume your office will print. Consider how much paper the default paper tray (or trays) hold: assuming that each person in the office prints the standard estimate of 35 pages per day, calculate how frequently people would need to reload paper on a given model.

Thanks to allbusiness.com information used in this article. http://www.allbusiness.com

Sound like something you would like to get more information about? For more information please contact Courtney Carlson at 651-605-2500 or printersales@iotsolutions.com.

IOT is a Certified HP Business Partner, providing laser printer and copier support, sales and supplies to the Minneapolis, Saint Paul area since 1995. Located in Eagan, MN we proudly serve the Twin Cities metro area. Contact us at 651-605-2500 or email us at info@iotsolutions.com for more information.