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I can understand that high-volume commercial
printing would not adhere to Moore's Law, since
it's a mature industry, with all that implies.
However, laser printing and color laser printing
have grown up with, and as part of, the computer
industry. Why d'you suppose color printing is
still so expensive?
The quotes we get for X number of pages have
not changed much in years. The equipment that's
able to print in color at a reasonably quick pace
has been plumetting in price. Departmental laser
color printers cost $50k just a few years ago,
and now cost $10k or less. Presumably, color
Docutechs (or equivalent) have been coming down
in price.
The cost of paper raw materials fluctuates, and
ordinary printer paper prices have declined only
slightly, but color-printing papers have improved
and seem to have declined (relatively) in price
(unless, as with computers, you insist on the top-
end, bleeding-edge product).
Inks/toners and application technologies keep
improving to give better quality, more speed, more
economical use of consumables.
Ubiquitous inkjet technologies have ensured that
there are millions of people cranking out all
sorts of color jobs from their home and small-biz
PCs... cards, brochures, letterhead.... stuff.
Similarly, people who would once have bought
an impact dot-matrix printer for home or SOHO
use will now routinely buy a small laser printer
for black'n'white printing.
Yet it is still prohibitively expensive to use
colo[u]r in a manual at less than 50,000 copies.
Why is that?
Yes, I know that most personal color is inkjet.
Is that the major part of the explanation?
When color laser printers finally break the
home-PC price barrier (as black'n'white lasers
did, several years ago), should I finally expect
to be able to print my manuals in color (400
pages, and a couple of hundred copies per
revision)??
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