#1: Student printing is a small fraction of total printing.

On-campus initiatives to cut printing often focus on students. They’re highly visible, they’re often the largest single user of printing, and they’re receptive to the environmental message. But, on the whole, student printing is often just a small fraction of total printing. Figures from one of Virebo’s clients, a large East Coast university, indicate that student computer-cluster printing is only about 14% percent of the total:

#2: Non-student printing is much more expensive than you might expect.

While student computer-cluster printing may have high volumes, non-student printing tends to have high costs. Cluster printers tend to be large, well-maintained, high-volume, fully-depreciated, often black-and-white machines. Office printers tend to be small, low-volume, color machines.

#3: Per-page costs vary enormously from printer to printer.

Small desktop printers are convenient, but using them for heavy printing can be a painful mistake. Some small printers cost ten times as much (or sometimes even more) than workgroup models. The graph below shows a cost histogram of printing at a large institution. The dark blue bar is the printer closest to the the 25th percentile of per-page costs. Note that per-page costs range from about two cents to over twelve cents.

If you click the image, you can explore it interactively at our online demo site: