TECH WATCH
In living color
Color Printing Made Easy
OKI Data targets real estate industry with printer, plus.
REPORTED BY MICHAEL ANTONIAK
Color printer maker Oki Data Americas wants to be your partner in print. And it’s proving it by releasing a selection of new hardware/software bundles for producing the color document used to promote real estate.
“A good-quality color document is critical to success when marketing property,” notes Sue Kirvan, Oki Data’s marketing manager. “You’ve got to have a colorful flyer or brochure to get people’s attention.”
Beginning in November 2002, the company started unveiling three new printer models for a good-better-best color solution for the real estate sales associate or brokerage office.
“We did a lot of market research, surveys, and focus groups to determine ways real estate professionals use color and how they were producing those documents before creating this solution,” Kirvan shares.
The company’s research found that salespeople preferred inkjet printers for most real estate applications, a choice usually made based on the purchase price of the hardware. Yet, many real estate professionals were not entirely pleased with this solution. Only after using the printer for a few months did they discover that the cost of all those ink cartridges really started to add up. Another complaint was that it took such a long time to produce quantities of color documents with an inkjet printer. Some practitioners reported that they had given up trying to print out their own marketing materials in quantity and were using a local quick print or copy shop for volume printing.
The company’s three new color printers use LED (light-emitting diode) technology for results comparable to color laser prints. But LED models have fewer moving parts, which make them more reliable than laser printers, according to the company. Oki backs those claims with a five-year warranty on its LED print heads.
The C5000 printer series, launched in January at a $999 base price, prints 12 color pages per minute (ppm), 20 pages monochrome on letter-sized, 81/2 x 11-inch paper. The $1,800 C7000 series prints letter- and legal-sized documents at 20 ppm color, 24 ppm monochrome. The C9000 series, with a base price of approximately $3,100, can also print 11 x 17-inch tabloid-size documents at 30 ppm color, 37 ppm monochrome.
Despite the fact that the new printers are significantly higher in price than inkjets, Kirvan says users with an ongoing need for color will realize savings over the long term, due to the cost of consumables. “The toner used by these printers has a longer life than inkjet cartridges, about 10,000 pages compared with less than 1,000 pages,” Kirvan says. The return on investment and level of savings depend on the volume of color work produced, of course.
But what makes these new printers especially attractive to real estate pros is Oki Data’s “Real Estate Edition” upgrade option. Buyers of Oki Data printer can spend an additional $150 and get a three- year subscription to the Web-based iDesign Works for Real Estate design center for up to ten people in one office. This hardware/software solution, which was developed in conjunction with Imprev Design Inc., is available with all Oki color printers, including the newest models.
At the password-protected, desktop publishing portal site, real estate practitioners will find a suite of templates and desktop publishing tools specifically geared to real estate marketing. Users can choose from a document library filled with examples of whatever they might need to promote their listings: flyers, door hangers, postcards, brochures, and more. Users can customize the templates with their own text, images, and contact information, then download the completed PDF file for printing.
The promise of potential savings added to the convenience of a turnkey printing and marketing solution is apparently reaching its audience. “We’ve found over the last couple of years the cost of the hardware is not as much an issue as it once was for real estate professionals,” Kirvan reports. “They seem be more technically savvy now than just a few years ago and realize the long-term benefits outweigh the initial cost.”
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More Resources:
Tech Watch: Painless Print Production , Michael Antoniak, September 2002
Buyer’s Guide: Desktop Publishing , March 2003.
For advice on choosing desktop publishing software, visit the Software Advisor.
Previously by Antoniak:
GMAC Embraces Blackberry
Comdex/Macworld Update
Tech Watch: Tech Strategies for 2003
A Quick Fix for E-Mailing Photos
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Do you have technology you’d like to learn more about or a new user twist that you’d like to share with your peers? Let me know about it by e-mailing antoniak@dtccom.net, and I’ll do my best to give it the coverage it deserves.
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