commercial copier review

How to Find the Best Digital Copiers for Business

When it comes to finding the right digital copier for your business, the choice can be complicated. There are so many different features to think about, and balancing the budget with your priorities can be tricky.

To best serve your office, you'll need to review digital copiers that can perform all the basic functions efficiently, meet your unique needs, and don't hurt your wallet. But how?

To help you make a decision, this article will guide you through the important questions you should be asking yourself when you shop for digital copiers.

Compare Prices

Average Number of Copies?

One of the most important questions to ask yourself is how many copies, on average does your business make per day. If your copier is slow and unautomated, it will take much longer to complete tasks, backing up your workflow.

Office Copiers

To keep your business running at full speed, you'll need to look at “ppm” or pages per minute. The higher the number, the faster your digital copier will print. For smaller businesses, you can get away with about 25-30 ppm. For larger businesses, you'll want at least 45-50ppm.

Make sure the digital copier also can handle the types of paper you use and a larger paper capacity. There's nothing more annoying than realizing the copier doesn't accommodate your paper or that you have to keep reloading the tray with every job.

Reviewing Over 1000 Products and Services

If a key part of your business is to make copies of documents that your clients or customers have provided, you are likely using the copier more than average. You might also be making more than one copy at a time. You'll need to find a copier that can handle high amounts of copying.

If you're frequently copying a high volume of large documents, you'll need a heavy-duty copier. The best digital copiers for this kind of job are the ones that include an automatic document feeder and double-sided copying.

This will decrease the effort and time required for copying each page. This type of copier will be the best for businesses that need to copy huge, double-sided documents.

Further, this kind of copier will make it easier and faster to copy large packets of information that need to be handed out to large groups of people at meetings.

Black and White or Color?

You can often get much more affordable digital copiers if you choose to only print in black and white. Most businesses can get away without color copying and printing because they handle mainly text-driven documents. If you are handling graphics and pictures often, however, black and white might not be satisfactory.

quality commercial copiers

While black and white copying and printing can be good enough if you're only using text or starkly different colors, your documents can come out muddy and illegible if you're using similar colors. Black and white copiers also might not transfer color pictures into clear black and white pictures.

If for any reason, you wish you had color copying and printing capabilities, you shouldn't settle for black and white digital copiers.

Do You Copy Graphics and Photos?

If you're handling photos and graphics, you should choose a digital copier with better resolution specs. Lower-budget digital copiers will handle text documents but won't print copies with the highest quality needed for photos and graphics. Instead, they'll come out muddy.

Purchasing Advice For Business

To begin, you'll most likely want a color-capable digital copier.

Second, you'll want to learn about pixels. Word documents only require an optical resolution of 600 pixels. Your graphics specs, however, should be much higher. You should look for digital copiers that can handle at least 4800 pixels for optical resolution.

You'll also want to look into the digital copier's color management.

Do You Need a Digital Copier That Can Fax?

While faxing often seems outdated to many, certain industries still heavily rely on faxing. For example, the healthcare industry still relies on frequent faxing for patient documents and billing purposes. You can buy a digital copier that has faxing capabilities.

Do You Need a Digital Copier That Can Scan?

If you are copying documents frequently, you may also be scanning or wishing you could scan. Scanning allows you to take paper files and store them digitally and send them over the internet.

Kyocera TASKalfa 8052ci copier

If you want to turn your office into a paperless operation, scanning allows you to digitize paper documents and get rid of them so that you aren't drowning in paper.

Businesses that work with low-budget scanners often have to deal with managing tons of files on their computer. They might have to scan each page individually, create a single file for each page, and then use software to compile these files into one document. This process wastes a lot of time and can be difficult to manage.

A great feature that can help with these workloads is to get a digital copier that can scan both sides of a document and multiple pages, then turn those pages into one complete file. To do this, you'll want a digital copier that has duplex scanning capabilities. This ability allows your digital copier to scan both sides of each document page and automatically send it to your computer as a ready-to-send file.

It also wouldn't hurt to have an automatic document feeder as well, if you're handling that many pages.

Do You Need Wi-Fi Capabilities?

It's true; digital copiers can get pretty fancy. In fact, you can even control them over your wireless network. If you'd like to send documents straight from your device to your digital copier, you can buy one that will connect to devices over Wi-Fi.

B2B Buying Advice

If you're choosing this option, you'll also need to consider how many people you'll have to set up for Wi-Fi access to your digital copier. It might get hectic to have too many people sending documents to the copier simultaneously. Your network also might get overwhelmed.

You might choose to buy more than one digital copier, each dedicated to its own department if you have many users.

Prioritize Features for Your Budget

Writing out a list of your needs and priorities can help you buy the best digital copiers for your business. Now that you've answered all these questions, you can buy digital copiers with confidence.

If you need further help choosing copiers for the office, visit SidebySidereview.com's comparison of the best digital copiers for business in 2021!

Compare Prices

Author: Hudson Piccini

Hudson Cynar, a Harvard University alumna and the owner of three prosperous enterprises, is a distinguished business consultant, author, and writer. Her expertise spans multiple business sectors, with a particular emphasis on storage containers, commercial copiers, payroll services, and medical billing software. Dedicatedly investing thousands of hours into product and service research, Hudson crafts insightful reviews to guide entrepreneurs in making informed decisions for their businesses.