Purchasing a Copier? Here’s What You Need to Know

Why is it important to have a copier onsite?

Having an onsite copier can provide many benefits to the workplace, no matter the size of your business. Modern office copiers are equipped with a variety of features, including high-quality, high-speed printing and advanced scanning, sending and document storage capabilities. These features can improve workplace flexibility, streamline workflows and provide cost-saving benefits.

Though third-party service providers exist, the price of relying on them can quickly add up. Using these services requires employees to spend valuable time traveling to these locations, which reduces productivity and adds extra expenses, on top of the service cost itself. Plus, third-party services are less secure than onsite copiers, which often include encryption and password protection to safeguard your company’s documents and ensure they remain confidential.

What are the types of copiers?

Businesses typically use one of two copier types: analog and digital. Here’s more information about each category. 

Analog system copiers

The first type of copier uses the analog system. This is an older system that uses an internal mirror to copy the original document’s image onto a drum inside the machine. Then, using static electricity, toner particles create the image mirrored on the drum. The machine then uses a heated element to dry and set the toner in place on a sheet of paper, creating a copy of the original document.

More modern systems are rapidly replacing this copier type, which lacks many of the features businesses expect today. However, you can still find analog copiers from established vendors at reasonable prices.

Digital system copiers

A more modern approach uses a digital system to copy the original document into memory. A laser imprints the information copied from the original document onto a drum inside the machine. The machine applies toner and prints the document copy. 

Since you can link a digital copier to different networks in an office, you can use digital document sharing to send an image to another network device. Digital document sharing is an extremely useful feature for many businesses.

Whether you have a home business, a small or midsize business, or a larger enterprise, you can find digital system copiers to serve your needs. 

• Home business copiers: At the home business level, copiers cross over with printers. They’re compact and designed for the tabletop, usually with only one paper tray and one output tray. They have high ink costs and a high cost per page (CPP) but require little investment or maintenance. Printers at this level have a useful life of three to five years and are designed to be replaced rather than repaired.
• Small business copiers: At the small business level, copiers usually run the full gamut of functionality, including sorting, stapling and making multiple sets of documents. These copiers are either purchased or leased, and they usually come with maintenance plans. These machines generally have a useful life of 5 to 10 years. You can sell or trade in used machines for new copiers. Even with maintenance costs included, the CPP for these machines is usually excellent.
• Commercial-grade copiers: Commercial-grade machines are designed for use in copy and print establishments, coffee shops, office buildings, post offices and busy offices — anywhere people need to make many copies of various shapes and sizes with different papers and bindings. Commercial machines usually have sophisticated touch screens that allow departmental accounting, access codes and card-reader attachments. At the high end, these machines can produce comb-bound reports, saddle-stitched catalogs and reports in multiring binders. Speeds are blazingly fast, even for color, and the CPP is very low. While these machines don’t have a useful life any greater than small-business-grade machines, they’re designed to be run at high volume, day and night.

Which copier features do I need?

There are many different copier sizes and features to choose from, depending on the size of the business and the volume of copying the machine will need to fulfill. Here are some features that can help a business regardless of the workload.

• General multifunction features: A multifunction (or all-in-one) copier will serve most companies well. Multifunction copiers can copy, print, scan, email and fax documents. You’ll usually select options on a touch screen to initiate the various functions.
• Automatic document feeder: Most copiers feature an automatic document feeder. Instead of placing the original document on the copier’s glass surface, an automatic document feeder grabs the next original from the feeder automatically. Document feeders can usually handle up to 50 original pages that will be fed into the copier without an operator having to position each original. You can program everything at the start of the copying process and then leave it to run, saving time and labor.
• Size options: Another helpful feature is a copier’s ability to reduce or enlarge a document’s size. For example, you might want to copy legal-size documents onto letter-size paper. Many copiers can enlarge a document by up to 600 percent, so you can customize the document sizes you need.
• Nonstandard paper sizes: A business may need to copy a document on a larger or smaller paper size than a standard letter-size sheet (8.5 inches by 11 inches). Some machines allow printing onto paper and envelopes as small as 3 inches wide or 3 inches long. Others will allow printing on legal paper (8.5 inches by 14 inches), oversized paper and many standard paper sizes between the minimum and maximum settings.
• Large paper drawer capacity: Copiers work by taking paper from one or more paper drawers. Businesses with high-volume copying needs will want a machine with a significant paper-drawer capacity. Companies that frequently need different paper sizes should look for multiple paper drawers that accommodate various paper stock sizes.
• Automatic sorting: Another useful copier feature is automatic sorting, which makes copies in the same order as the original. An automatic collator will copy and collate multiple copies of a long document. Machines with automatic collators usually have automatic binding equipment to staple or otherwise bind copies of collated documents. The way to measure the performance of feeders, sorters, collators and binders is to determine how long the original document can be and how many copies can be made, collated and bound in a single batch.
• Two-sided copying: A money-saving feature appearing in even entry-level copiers is the ability to perform two-sided copying, which reduces paper costs significantly.