ArticlesOne day, I am going to do some original research into a question that has plagued and haunted me – nay, us all – for years – a question that needs to be solved, once and for all, if we are ever to live in a harmonious society.
On a shared office printer, are mandatory banner pages simply a waste of paper?
Consider the number of lost, stolen and forgotten printouts in the modern office. Do banner pages reduce them enough to pay for themselves?
I will model the problem mathematically, conduct a number of laboratory tests and field research, and finally blow this mystery apart.
My only question is whether to seek public funding and get a doctorate from this, or stick to private sponsorship and to recoup the investment by writing a best-selling book on the subject.
Canon, Epson: the ball is in your court.
In my first ever foray into Postscript, I hacked the code that generated the banner page.
I changed it to print out personal notepaper. The company logo appeared in the top corner, above the legend “From the desk of Julian”, included my contact details. There was a neatly ruled line, and most of the page was left blank for notes.
It served its purpose as a banner page (my name appeared on it prominently) and then it served a second purpose as professional-looking notepaper.
I also considered making Phone Messages pad templates. (Remember those, before we had voicemail and email?) However, with room for about 4 copies of the template per A4 page, the number of print jobs I made outweighed the number of messages I took for others by at least an order of magnitude.
Quite a few people copied my PostScript code. Sometimes, upon quiet reflection, I think it was my contribution to that company of which I am most proud!
Comment by cris on August 29, 2007
can you send me that postscript for the notepad paper?
Comment by Julian on August 31, 2007
Sorry, Cris.
I wrote that code on a VAX/VMS system in 1992. Even if it did still exist, and if I did still have access to it, the copyright would be held by the company that I worked for at the time.
In any case, if you had the Postscript nous to edit the code to correct the logo and style to match the branding of your organisation, you would probably have the nous to write it from scratch very quickly.
Comment by Josh on June 13, 2009
Interesting, I too am plagued with this question. I contend that in offices where printers are shared by 10 -25 users, banner pages serve a purpose and ultimately save paper. We actually did a survey last year and 51% wanted banners and gave specific reasons why they benefited from them. The other 49% who did not want a banner only stated they wanted to save the planet. There are three main benefits to having a banner; Time, Reprints, and Support. Time is saved by users not having to sort and search jobs. This leads to higher productivity. Reprints should go down or not happen if users are able to identify their jobs and will result in less paper consumed. Support goes down with fewer calls to the support center asking where their output went. You might even add there is a slight level a confidentiality in that a person would not have to search the content of a job to find the owner when the banner page clearly states who the owner is. I am about to do a pilot in an office where we are going to disable banner pages for a time period. I will compare historical data with the new data and look for job reprints. Hopefully the results will give a clear answer.
My position is, if there is no need for a banner page then there are too many printers in the area. This is assuming no job pulling software is in place. With that type of software banners are not needed. However you will need to weigh the cost of the paper savings to implementing a new print server technology in your company.
Comment by Palermo on August 1, 2009
I’m looking into this also, and some printer vendors have on-printer (no extra cost) solutions. The Lexmark TS654 is the most recent example I’ve tested. It’s “Reserve Print” function holds the print job on the printer’s hard drive until it needs to be printed. Unfortunately the Reserve Print only shows the first 4 characters of the username at the printer. Not perfect, but they are on the right track. At 55ppm, the printer isn’t slow, so even printing 50 page documents on-demand isn’t bad. I don’t work for Lexmark, I would for a university. I only mention the brand name because this is the best implementation I’ve seen so far for eliminating banner pages without increasing the time it takes for people to find their printouts. It would be nice if this option was available on all mid-range printers.