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I was talking with one of our Client Support Managers the other night as he recounted a discussion he had with a new prospective client. In describing the various criteria the client had for selecting a new colour mfp (colour capable multifunction printer) what struck me was that image quality never entered the details of the discussion.

In discussion with the potential client a great deal of time was spent with a description of the frustrations that had ocurred with their current equipment. Many of these centered around slow support response, poor communication and some inherent equipment design features that made clearing paper jams a challenge.

Hearing stories about poor communication and slow response is not new. The incumbent supplier is a national brand that has a nationally focused support team using a long distance call centre and this design has built in challenges as the call centre personnel can never know really well all of the territory they are dispatching to.

On the other hand it was very surprising to me that image quality was not an item of discussion either explicitly or implicitly as part of the support issues. The device involved is a colour mfp coming to the end of a 66 month lease. In the past five and a half years digital colour production quality has changed substantially for all of the major brands. What we take for granted today would have been outstanding and exceptional five and a half years ago. For the users not to have had issues with image quality would seem almost impossible. ]read more here
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Color quality is not an issue, until it is an issue! Too often customers wrongly assume that if one MFD can do something fine, the other it do it just as well. They WANT it to be a commodity!

The reason that many of the features of an MFD are only mildly interesting to the customer is either because WE have done a poor job showing them how the feature will help them solve a business problem, or you are talking to the wrong person.

If you are only talking to the Purchaser then all they care about is speeds & feeds, they want to reduce the discussion to that. Here is a great example of how this can go horribly wrong (with a new follow up comment that I added today). Click on the [URL=Why RFPs don't work]http://theconnectedcopier.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/why-rfp-for-copiers-dont-work-anymore-whos-buying-just-copiers/#comment-1314[/URL] URL Link to read it.
Let me ask everyone...with respect to the title of this thread "Image Quality not the main criteria in an MFP purchase".

Lately I'll mention the scan speed of the device before I mention the speed of the device. I'm finding more and more prospects are more concerned about speed of the scanner, and secondary features such as scan2pdf, scan2folder, scan2word, scan2excel, blank page detection, and drop out color. Thoughts?
Vince has some excellent points but I remember when selling Word Processing Systems that the highest quality available was a Diablo 630 with a Steel Printwheel and Carbon Ribbon, then came laser printers and then the highest acceptable quality became a laser copy. The bar was greatly LOWERED to accept laser quality (nothing more than a copy). Perhaps what we're seeing is the lowering of expectations as to what is acceptable (production printing notwithstanding). Scanning speeds vs output speeds . . . much the same thing has occured; since printing vs copying is now the primary use, the amount of time spent in front of an MFP is for scanning, where the workflow and its ease-of-use vs speed should be the concern. But Vince is right, let that color output start degrading and the customer'll let you know.

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