The office printer can be one of the most beloved and maligned devices at work depending upon whether or not it chooses to cooperate at the specific moment you need it. Of course office printers don’t have minds of their own, but no one will blame you if you insist there are gremlins doing their dirty work in the inner workings while you’re on deadline.
Like a lot of devices in the modern workplace, printers are complicated machines. Not only do they run on software, but that software also orchestrates some complex engineering to carry out tasks that we take for granted. While you need not worship at the altar of your office printer, the important takeaway here is that a ton of things have to go right before you can print the cover sheets for those TPS reports.
That said, there are plenty of things that can go wrong with your office printer. Let’s examine a few common office printer problems and discuss how you can avoid them.
Low Printer Ink
If your company does a lot of printing on a consistent basis, you may be chronically plagued by dwindling ink supplies. Slowly but surely, that crisp black text will fade until your printer spits out blank pages.
As every business owner knows, ink isn’t cheap. Depending upon how much of it your business needs, printer ink can take up a significant portion of your company’s monthly budget relative to the benefit it provides – especially if you compare the savings you could gain by outsourcing major printing projects.
Poor Print Quality
Some offices are equipped with printing workhorses that can deliver high-quality printers almost every single time for years to come. If you’re like most small business owners, though, sinking thousands of dollars into one of these machines may not be the most sensible solution to your everyday needs.
Many business owners equip themselves with robust office printers that can do a fair job, but over time the quality of the prints they produce can drop off. This can happen as a result of mechanical wear and tear or a software error. These can sometimes be rectified by cleaning the nozzles, realigning the print head, or updating/reinstalling the device’s software.
If the print quality of a project must be perfect, it’s best to seek out professional printing services to avoid wasting time and money.
Printing Takes a Long Time
Unless you have a commercial printer, chances are it’s going to take some time to print a large project. Most companies connect their printers to their Wi-Fi, which offers the convenience of allowing anyone to print from anywhere in the office. The tradeoff here is that the speed at which the printer receives the document it needs to print depends upon the bandwidth and quality of the Wi-Fi service.
If the Wi-Fi in an office is slow for any particular reason, then transmitting the data to the printer will also take a long time. Depending upon the size of the document, this can range from several minutes to over half an hour – assuming the connection doesn’t drop out!
Once the printer has received the file, it must then take time to print the project. This can also take a significant amount of time, depending entirely upon how many pages a document has and how fast the printer can produce accurate, high-quality prints.
Paper Jams
A paper jam is a classic problem that almost everyone has experienced. While a lot of thought and engineering has gone into decreasing this problem, it still happens from time to time.
Perhaps the worst time for a paper jam to occur is when you’re in the middle of printing an important multi-page document. You wouldn’t need to worry about being plagued by this problem, though, if you hired a company like Acro Photo Print Inc. to handle your business’s printing needs.
For more than 45 years, our business has been helping others like yours in New York and nationwide. Learn more about all of our printing and scanning services when you contact us today.
Reach out to us online or call (929) 244-4322 to speak with a specialist who can assist you.