If your small business needs a copier for the office, you must consider the model you buy. Even though copiers are a common piece of office equipment, that doesn’t mean they’re all created equal. There is an enormous variety, with different models offering different features, functionalities, response times, and overall efficiency. If you’re looking for an efficient copier that will provide the documents you need and make your office more productive, then keep reading. We’ll tell you what you need to consider before buying a copier in Fairbanks, AK, to find the most efficient model for your needs.
Print Speed
Sitting around and waiting for the copier to finish your copy order isn’t very efficient. It would help if you had a copier that could produce many copies in a minimal time, so you don’t have to wait around. While some copiers only produce about 20 pages per minute, higher-end models can create over 50 pages simultaneously. You can imagine how quickly this time difference can add up in an office setting that frequently relies on a copy machine to get work done.
Response Time
Print speed is only a part of the equation when we’re talking about how quickly a copier can get your copies completed. After all, the print speed only refers to how fast the copier can produce those copies after it’s received, processed, and started in your copy order. You also need to pay attention to how long it takes a copier to boot up, communicate with your devices, and start processing your employees’ document requests. Nobody wants to stand around and wait while the copy machine takes several minutes to warm up.
Paper Tray Size
You might not think your paper tray’s size is essential when discussing efficiency, but it certainly can be. In offices that use a lot of paper, a small paper tray frequently has to stop all copy and print orders to refill the tray. This may not seem like it takes a lot of time, but it’s one of those little things that add up into a significant waste of time over the course of a year. A larger paper tray allows your machine to keep turning out copies for longer without stopping.
Multifunction Machine
So far, we’ve referred to only copiers. However, it’s unusual for a modern office to have a machine that only performs one function. The gold standard for office copiers is a multifunction device, or MFD, which can typically copy, print, scan, and fax from the same device—those are just the essential functions. A multifunction machine like this makes it much easier to effectively manage your documents from a single machine, rather than taking up extra office space for separate equipment for each task.
Many multifunction devices will even allow you to perform multiple tasks on the same document. For example, you may be able to create a copy of a document while simultaneously scanning and emailing a digital version of the document to yourself. This is a much more efficient option than running the same paper through separate machines to get the same job done.
Additional Features
As we mentioned above, printing, copying, scanning, and faxing are the core functions of most modern MFDs. There are many additional features that these devices can have added to them to help improve their efficiency and, thereby, improve the overall productivity of your office. Here are just a few of the standard add-on features that you might consider when buying a business copier for your office:
OCR – Short for optical character recognition, this capability allows your scanner to do more than capture a static image of a document. It can recognize the letter on the document just as you would and will create a searchable document from the scanned image. This makes it much easier to organize and search your documents rather than manually opening every scanned document and reading through it yourself for the necessary information.
Stapling – Need to put together several document packets? Flipping through a big stack of copied papers and separating them into packets, then stapling each packet together by hand, is a time-consuming and tedious task. Modern office machines can be programmed to perform this task for you, stapling each packet together immediately after copying it.
Hole punching – Similarly, hole punching stacks of papers to fit into a folder or 3-ring binder is hardly a task you want to pay an employee to spend their time on. Let your machine do it instead, so your papers come out of the printer already punched and ready to go into a binder or folder.
2-sided papers – Double-sided documents should never be something you have to deal with by hand. A modern machine needs to be able to print on both sides of a paper, scan a double-sided document, and reproduce copies of two-sided documents as well; it should be able to do all that without you ever having to flip over and reload a sheet of paper.
Wireless printing – Everything is connected to the internet these days, including your office printer. With so much work from portable devices like laptops, tablets, and even smartphones, you shouldn’t have to return to a desktop computer to print a document you need. A Wi-Fi-enabled printer should have wireless printing capabilities so that you can order those prints from anywhere in the office.
Each of these features may not seem to add up to much in terms of efficiency. But when you find the best office printer and copier in Fairbanks, AK—one that has all of these capabilities while also providing a high print speed, rapid response time, and large paper tray—you’re sure to notice the difference in your office’s overall productivity. Contact Arctic Office Products today to learn more about our business MFDs and their features.