Monthly Duty Cycle: Can your laser printer really print that much?

       Photo by cinz

In a meeting held by a conglomeration of laser printer vendors, Buyer’s Laboratory Information (BLI) and Testing Advisory Committee (TAC) is one in the belief that a printer’s monthly duty cycle is grossly overstated. A case in point is the Xerox 7750 which comes with the recommended ‘monthly duty cycle’ of 150,000. This however is otherwise confusing since the rated capacity does not in fact reflect reality. Should the user consistently push the printer to its optimum capacity then this would result in frequent maintenance work and servicing. Equipment subjected to this type of use will certainly not endure the three-year lease in equipment life.

THE FACT, as discovered by BLI’S reliability test process states that it is not possible for a printer to consistently deliver the rated capacity under a normal eight-hour day. The sad truth on the other hand is that laser printers that cannot deliver the rated capacity daily cannot be expected to perform just as much on a monthly basis. The root for the computation of a printers monthly duty cycle is indeed murky; although it is evident that this represents the amount of work delivered by the printer monthly. The monthly duty cycle for any printer however is not the potential volume of prints that it could possibly produce. Here is an analogy. For a vehicle that comes rated with a 200 miles per hour (mph) velocity, the driver is of course not expected to be constantly pushing the accelerator pedal flat on the floor 8 hours a day, 30 days a month. While it is true that the vehicle can run 200 mph, it is seldom for the driver to cruise at the maximum velocity.

This also holds true with color laser printers. Although the rated monthly duty cycle can be harnessed when the need arises, users seldom print at the rated capacity volumes. On the average, only 10 percent (10%) of the printer's rated capacity is reached. This reflects just how a 150,000 ‘monthly duty cycle’ unit like the Xerox 7750 laser printer is utilized to deliver only as much as 15,000 pages of documents in any given month. At this monthly rate of 15,000 pages, the laser printer will not suffer rapid component deterioration; thus servicing and maintenance costs will indeed be lower and a longer end life for the printer can be expected. Color printers under the Xerox 7750 line come with a monochrome toner consumable rated 32,000 pages at the standard coverage of 5% in anticipation of high volume print jobs. Thus with a high yielding toner cartridge, lesser uses intervention becomes necessary during printing, particularly during times of heavy print load.