Ricoh, alongside new distribution partner Midwich, has renewed its GelSprinter push this year and expanded beyond the home office or SME customer, with an eye to the education market. So is the education sector worth pursuing and can GelSprinters give VARs an edge?

Simon Barclay, pre-sales technical consultant from Nottingham-based Ramesys IT, does a lot of work in the education arena. The market is certainly attracting more interest from vendors and their channel partners.

“I think there are more companies trying to muscle into this space, perhaps due in part to the downturn in the corporate sector,” he says.

Money is available for education implementations and competition in this market is intensifying. Meanwhile, cutting printing costs is one way schools are trying to save money – ­ either by limiting the amount of printing done or by having fewer, more efficient printers, says Barclay.

He says that schools have also been eyeing consolidation of printing functions. A large multi-functional device (MFD) might be hosted in each department, and individual classroom jobs can be printed off at that single printer.
“It can be the most cost-effective way to manage printing,” he says.
Richard Green, project advisor for technical strategy at the government’s British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), agrees.

“They are going from maybe several printers at one school to fewer,” he says. “So when they buy printers, they are looking outside the more traditional sort of product that costs them a fortune in toner.”

Jonathan Francis, printing and imaging business manager at Norfolk-based Midwich, says a lot of the marketing the distributor is performing is aimed at the first quarter of 2009. Schools are thinking about next year’s spend now.

“We are working closely with a lot of our vendors, including Ricoh, to target education,” says Francis.
Richard Allison, IT channel manager at Ricoh, says hard times mean that vendors are seeking to work better with their supply chain, particularly channel partners.

“But we believe that with our gel technology we have something unique to offer the education market as well, and Ricoh is still quite a new brand in the IT channel,” he claims.

Allison says the vendor’s core MFD business is growing, but Ricoh’s strategy is to grow its production base and the lower-end business. The company wants to raise channel awareness of its entire portfolio. However, the GelSprinter range uses a different, although no longer new, technology.

GelSprinters use a fast-evaporating liquid gel – ­ as opposed to a wax or an ink – ­ and a wider-than-usual, 32.3mm print head. An electrostatic belt transfer system controls the printable area and paper handling capability.
Allison says the fast gelatinising and drying of the gel, which is compatible with plain paper, means that blurring and smudging can be kept to a minimum and users can print duplex pages much faster.

Level Color mode divides the print data into texts and images or graphics. In this mode, text is
printed at normal thickness, while images and graphics are printed at about half the standard thickness, which saves on gel.

Unlike the draft mode available on some printers, Level Color enables clear, legible text while saving on consumables.
Allison says that colour printing costs can be slashed by opting for the Level Color mode, which reduces the colour intensity of the result to 65 per cent.

The printers also have a dual tank system to minimise gel wastage. Gel vacuum packed in the cartridge is fed to the empty head tank via a cartridge tube when the head tank volume falls below a certain level.
According to Ricoh, this means all the gel is used ­ there are no leftovers when a cartridge is due to be replaced. Again, this is a cost-saving measure.

The 384-nozzle print heads are cleaned automatically if unused for a certain amount of time.
The technology, compared with laser, is cost effective to buy and to use ­ another advantage when selling hardware into schools, according to Allison.
“We think gel combines the best features of both laser and inkjet,” he says. “And recent acquisitions mean we now have considerably more engineers in the UK to serve our printer customers.”

Mark Adams, purchasing manager at IT retailer Galtec, says that services such as Ricoh’s soon-to-be launched Click managed print offering are a great way to control printing costs and manage the print function in all sizes and types of organisation.

“Primary schools are also different to further education establishments or secondary schools when it comes to printing needs. Primary is still a printer market, while the further education market is more about managed services,” he says.

Adams added that he would like to see gel printing expanded into a higher-capacity printing product, because the efficiencies could be even more useful when printing higher volumes.

GelSprinters use between five per cent and 10 per cent of the power of traditional printers, he claims.