Welcome to our August edition of Talking about IT. Winter has certainly well and truly hit now, much to all the ski bunnies delight!

To continue with the cost saving theme we’ve had in the last few months, we are now focusing on print – and where you can save money. We have a new product offering that we’re all pretty excited about – NeoPrint, which enables you to take control of your printing costs by only paying for the actual pages you print.  

We also have some helpful printing tips from Aunty June and some of those common but baffling acronyms and terms in our Jargon Buster.

And don’t forget to enter our prize draw where you could win an OKI MC160 Colour Multifunction Printer!

NeoPrint is a ‘Managed Print Service’ (MPS), also known as “Click”, “Pay as you go” or “Cost per Copy”. NEOPRINT allows you to manage your printing by only paying for the pages you print, meaning you can easily budget for your printing costs and know exactly what each document costs you.

The benefits of NeoPrint are:

• No ‘bill shock’ for expensive consumables
• Only pay for what you use
• Just in time toner delivery means you always have a toner on hand
• No extra maintenance charges
• Large range of Executive Series printers to choose from

NeoPrint offers a number of solutions when it comes to your printing and we'll help you make the right choice based on your printing requirements. NeoPrint delivers the latest in print and imaging technology and provides a number of payment options depending on your usage.

Call today to find out which NeoPrint solution best fits your requirements.

On average a sheet of basic white A4 copy paper costs 1.6c, meaning your paper is possibly more expensive than the toner you are using! When you print on both the front and back of each page, you reduce your paper use by up to 50 percent. You can make this easy by purchasing a printer with a duplexer built-in, and setting the default settings in your driver to “print on both sides”.

Draft/Toner Save Mode

Your printer may be automatically set to print at a higher quality than you need for everyday print jobs. For these things, Draft mode, which is quicker and uses less ink (therefore costing you less), will give you what you need.

If you regularly use combinations of print settings (e.g. certain paper type, layout options, tray options etc.) and don't want to have to keep entering these settings each time you print, you can save the settings as a second printer. For example – you could have a Draft Mode Printer and a High Quality Printer set up going to the same printer, but the draft mode as the default, meaning you only print high quality when you really need to.

How often do you print an email to find the last page just has 3 lines of an email signature? Use the print preview feature to save on printing. It will let you see how a document will look on the page before you print it. Simply select File > Print Preview. Hit Esc to return to the normal view. Microsoft Word even allows you to type documents in page layout, so you can see what your page will look like in printed form while you're typing. Just go to View > Page Layout.

Paper

• Never use inkjet paper in a laser printer; as a laser printer uses heat and can melt inkjet paper and cause damage. 
• Damaged edges, known as ‘Dog Ears’ can cause paper jams.
• Paper is made from a natural fibre that reacts to humidity and is affected by temperature, and paper made for photocopying or laser printing is made dryer to improve image retention and flatness after toner fusion. It is strongly recommended that paper be left in its moisture proof wrappers in a dry place. Cold paper attracts moisture from the air similarly to a cold bottle in a warm room.
• Be sure to fan your paper out before loading into the printer, and don’t overload your printer, if you don’t go through enough paper.
• If you do get a paper jam never pull it backwards, always pull in the direction it is meant to come, as pulling it backwards can damage the printer.

The prize up for grabs in this edition is an OKI MC160 Colour Multifunction Printer valued $649! Everyone that answers the question below will go into the draw to win.

To enter the draw This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Question: What would you like to see covered in future Neos Newsletters?

Entries close 31 August 2011

If you find yourself going a bit cross-eyed trying to understand all the confusing acronyms that come with the computer world, then we have the solution for you! We’ve put together a jargon buster to make things a little bit less bewildering.

GDI – Graphics Device Interface:
GDI is a printer language for Windows based operating systems only (something Anthony learnt about the hard way!). Basically the computer does all the work when processing the print job; it creates a bitmap image which is then sent to a software printer driver which then sends it to the printer.
GDI printers are a lot cheaper than others as they do not have the ability to print complex print jobs that require either a PCL or Postscript driver to print correctly.
GDI printers are usually used at home or in a small office environment when you only need to print simple documents from a windows based computer.

PCL:
PCL (Printer Command Language) was developed by HP back in 1984 and it is today’s industry standard printer protocol. Since 1984 there have been many levels of PCL, starting with PCL1 and are now at PCL6 (wow how IT changes so fast!)
PCL is a stack based, object oriented protocol similar to postscript but is restricted to binary encoding as opposed to PostScript which can be sent to either binary code or Plain Text.
PCL allows fast print processing so is best used for general office printing, such as word docs, emails and spreadsheets.

PostScript:
PostScript is its own programming language which means it’s very ‘complicated’ but basically Postscript has the ability to do on-the-fly rasterisation which means large files are processed on the printer (or a RIP device, but let’s not go there today). Rasterisation in basic terms breaks down the print job into straight lines and cubic Bezier curves which allows for easy scaling, rotating and other transformations.
Now if I’ve lost you along the way all you need to remember is that PostScript is best used when printing photos, images, CAD drawings etc, that’s why it’s mainly used by Graphic Designers, Architects, the printing industry, Signwriters etc.

TCO:
Total cost of ownership calculates how much a printer is going to cost you over its lifetime. When purchasing a printer, we tend to look at the price tag and do not take into account the other variables that accumulate during the life of the printer such as consumables, reliability and support.
The idea behind it is that if you have an idea of what your printing levels will be, you can calculate how much the consumables for a cheap and more expensive printer will be and where your return on investment lies.