How the Photocopiers Industry Authority, BERTL, Picks the Best

When reading about Canon's recent success at BERTL's 'Spring Pick' Awards a month or so ago, it quickly became apparent that BERTL, who are now the major assessment authority within the photocopiers industry, have made some pretty significant changes to the way they judge performance for the world's major photocopiers manufacturers. In many ways echoing the view of Trevor Dodsworth, Canon UK's Head of Product Marketing, who recently spoke of Canon's own device product development drivers, BERTL are placing ever more emphasis on end-user needs than whatever the rest of the industry's own internal performance criteria happen to be at any given time. BERTL and Art Wynne, the company's President, very kindly agreed to shed some light on how the world's leading photocopiers manufacturers are being assessed today.

BERTL

For those entirely new to photocopiers or those looking at photocopiers for the first time in a long time, BERTL, which stands for Buisness Equipment Research and Testing Laboratory Inc and they do exactly that. BERTL provides laboratory testing of both devices and software solutions with the objective of producing indpendent product evaluation reports and comparative analyses. Manufacturers possess no influence over BERTL's evaluations and the company prides itself on the rigour of its research and analyses.

The focus of BERTL's efforts are not the manufacturers but the end-user. All reports, customer satisfaction research, product ratings and its industry-renowned awards scheme are conducted entirely at BERTL's expense and for the benefit of the company's global subscribers. Covering all of the world's major manufacturers and software producers in the business equipment field, BERTL provides a highly comprehensive website, containing evaluation reports, data, vertical market research and news on all office equipment from photocopiers, MFP's, printers, document scanners, fax machines and even wide format printers.

BERTL's Assessment Rationale

For many looking to buy office devices and who do not want to take a chance on whichever salesman approaches them first, BERTL provides an essential one-stop-shop in the BERTL Awards for determining the best devices around in any given year. Canon's success at this year's BERTL Awards revealed some interesting changes to the way the company makes its assessments. BERTL outlines this on the 'Awards' section of its website,

"Keeping up with the times and the demands of its end-users, BERTL left behind the simple speed and feed productivity artificial reliability tests and theoretical SRP pricing lists and focused on the end-user and the business dynamics when putting together the year's 'Best of the Best'"

It is very clear, BERTL has made great efforts to broaden and deepen its assessment criteria. Speed in particular, which has started to plateau in the last few years anyway, particularly when it comes to office photocopiers and MFP's, is no longer the 'be-all and end-all'. As the explanation continues,

"While it may be easy to divide up the market into speed groupings, it can often place devices of very different capabilities side-by-side."

Art Wynne, President of BERTL, elaborated,

"Speed is no longer the primary consideration for end users. They are concerned with a far broader range of criteria - if a device can reproduce colours accurately (especially logos), if a device has adequate security measures...what finishing options are available (so that a whole job completed at the device), how easily jobs on a device can be monitored and whether a device has 'green' policies to ensure that the overall impact on the environment is minimised."

Wynne added,

"While these are just a few of the overall concerns end-users may have, BERTL uses 11 different criteria for testing the devices we issue reports on."

But Wynne was also very keen to stress the growing importance of context within the industry. While many organisations will require more-or-less the same 'basics', different sectors understandably have differing priorities when it comes to office technologies. Wynne continued,

"As for the vertical market applications and business benefits there are unique considerations for different markets... For instance, in the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) vertical, there is a need to know precisely how accurate the scanning is, what types and sizes of media a device can accommodate, how much room a device needs to have for planned to be scanned-in and printed-off and lately, if there's an ability to scan-to or print from the cloud. In the medical and legal verticals, there's a definite need to know about the security features."

While BERTL today make a very useful destinction between desktop, workgroup, department and production it's very clear from Wynn's analyses of the best assessment criteria that the most impressive devices today not only need to be multifuntional but also in a way multi-'vertical' too, responding adequately, convincingly to the very real and varied needs of the economy's different business sectors. While there will inevitably be a greater emphasis on some features than others in particular verticals, it's clear that from BERTL's assessment criteria, the real skill for today's manufacturers is to provide all.

It's impressive to see that BERTL who are relied upon by organisations across the globe for their scrutinizing eye have evolved such an evidently rigorous judgement criteria. It's interesting to note as well, much as Canon outlined in a recent article, speed for BERTL no longer seems to be the primary, 'trump-all' consideration for most end-users.

Falcon would like to extend its thanks to Art Wynne and the team at BERTL for sharing their insights and welcomes any enquiries about the latest crop of 'BERTL's Best' award-winning Canon imageRUNNER and Canon imageRUNNER Advance devices, available on photocopier leasing packages or to buy.

About the Author

Jeremy Samson is an imaging technology expert writing extensively on the latest developments in the document managment industry.

Photocopiers and MFP's - What's the Difference?

The simple answer is that to many people today the terms 'photocopier' and 'MFP' have become inter-changeable. But the equation in terminology, while a useful short-hand, particularly from the technologically unaware user's point of view, masks a world of difference in technology and functionality. Over the past decade or so, the MFP has really been at the leading-edge of reprographics developments, the bearer of the latest innovations and the most significant technological advancements. While many today continue to regard photocopiers and MFP's as one and the same thing, there should be no confusion that the technology involved has come a very long way, to the extent that very few devices today would offer solely conventional photocopying functionality alone. MFP's have been quietly redefining what is possible through what was once a fairly cumbersome, single-function device. Here, we'll explore just how much photocopiers have evolved over the years and what today's organisations can expect from when buying or leasing a photocopier/MFP.

The MFP - From Conventional Analogue Photocopier to Digital Multifunctional Device

When photocopiers bagan to be more widely available during the 1960's, they were huge trundling leviathans of machines, with just the one single function - photocopying. They were often slow, would usually only handle very limited media sizes and weights and would struggle with any larger workloads.

Canon was the first photocopiers manufacturer to introduce electrostatic colour photocopiers, launching the first mass-produced colour model in 1973. The 1970's and 80's saw gradual improvements in the productivity and well as the reprographic quality of photocopiers and accompanying reductions in the actual size of devices themselves. But it was really in the mid to late ninetees that photocopiers technology really began to take-off. As the world was finding its feet with PC's and the internet, personal computer technology was beginning to filter through to photocopiers, so that more advanced user interfaces and operating systems could give photocopiers users access to a greater range of photocopying and printing options. For the first time, photocopiers could be networked to users' workstations, so that as well as photocopying at the device itself, users could send print jobs to the print servers or to the devices themselves, effectively doubling the photocopier's functionality. Attending these developments were improvements to media handling, so that devices could accomodate various paper weights and a variety of paper sizes. And at the close of the last millenium photocopiers also began to include an extended range of finsihing options so that the conventional copier could not only print as well as copy but could print a variety of documents, providing stapling, hole-punching and various kinds of folding finishing options. Scanning also came to be a more regular feature on photcoopiers, initially just black and white or monochrome but increasingly, colour scanning has become prevalent among many more high-end devices.

MFP's and Photocopiers Today

In the last decade, the rate of technological change in photocopier/MFP technology has been astonishing. With more sophisticated on-board embedded platforms, users have been given a much greater level of control over device output and have been empowered to create dynamic document workflows between users and devices. With the greater levels of integration between photocopiers and back-end systems, using PDL's and   ">MEAP connectors for example, and integration with commomly-used desktop software, using WYSIWYG print publishing and previews for example, photocopers and MFP's have effectively broken-down the boundaries between desktop and printer, so for example, documents may be previewed on devices before they progress further down the document workflow. What is known as Universal Send provides limitless possibilities for documents once they have been scanned in. It's now possible to scan directly to an   ">FTP site, to SMB or to users' email accounts. Canon's CloudConnect feature connects Canon MFP's with leading cloud-based services, such as Google Docs or Microsoft Sharepoint, so that documents may be printed off at an MFP/photocopier from a mobile device and conversely scanned in at an MFP/photocopier to a mobile device, a technology which further expands the parameters of document workflows.

But a major difference between a modern day photocopier/MFP and predecessors 15/20 years ago is energy consumption. Th latest Canon imageRUNNER Advance photocopiers today consume up to 65% less energy than their equivalents only 10/15 years ago. Very few modern devices will not have had to met some energy consumption standards, be that TEC energy consumption, Energy Star accreditation or RoHS and some photocopiers, again taking Canon's imageRUNNER Advance series as an example, are made using recylcled materials and bio platics, to save on energy consumption and CO2 emissions during manufacturer. So even though photocopiers today do so much more by way of performance, they typically cost much less to run, especially now that service access is given increasing consideration in photocopiers design.

To refer to a modern-day multifunction printer (MFP) as a photocopier is entirely acceptable. It is afterall from the photocopier which the MFP originates and for many, though certainly not all, the primary function of an MFP remains photocopying. However, if anyone thought for a second that what they understood to be a photocopier 10/15/20 years ago bears really anything but a notional resemblance with photocopiers/MFP's today they'd be much mistaken. Photocopiers or MFP's, as they're more often known within the industry today, provide a huge wealth of features and functionality, so that for many companies today they have effectively become an organsiational hub for all their document management needs. Providing for a multitude of document output requirements and offering scanning, printing, faxing and i-send functionality, today's MFP/photocopier can make the conventional photocopier look veritably antique.

Falcon is one of the UK's leading Canon photocopiers suppliers and a leader in document management solutions. For further information about photocopier leasing, the latest Canon photocopiers or for any other enquiries, please contact Falcon.

About the Author

Jeremy Samson is an imaging technology expert writing extensively on the latest developments in the document managment industry.