Cheap photocoping

studentphil

Is it really good value for 5p a sheet of A4 that the uni offers, or can you find it cheaper?

EthelBloggs

dunno... not done any yet, lol but i do think 5p is pretty good.. most shops n stuff are @ least 10p as far as I know

lellie

2p a sheet in oxfam and local newsagents near our uni. It used to be 3p but has gone down.

Our uni library charges 6p. Rip off! We have no choice a lot of the time though if copying reference material.

SunnyBrighton_2

If you have any dyslexic student colleagues, then they might have had some equipment from their local authority to help them with their studies, which might include a printer/scanner. They might be happy to copy stuff for you for a minimal charge to cover ink and paper?

Baileys_Babe

studentphil wrote:

Is it really good value for 5p a sheet of A4 that the uni offers, or can you find it cheaper?

I think this is quite good, where I work we charge 10p per sheet (bw or colour) which I think is a rip off.

Some accademic institutions have a pre payment card scheme where you charge up a payment card, but the cost per copy is cheaper than paying as and when.

Sarahpuggy

The very best decision i made at uni was to buy an all in one scanner/copier/printer. The cartridges lasted ages and i used it loads. I dont know if this will help you as i was on a design based course so i needed to do this stuff all the time!

but yeh 5pm sounds about the going rate to me, thats what it was at our uni anyway.

x

lellie

Baileys_Babe wrote:

Some academic institutions have a pre payment card scheme where you charge up a payment card, but the cost per copy is cheaper than paying as and when.

see we can only copy using pre-payment at uni. The departmental resource centre makes us pay for a £5 card which has 100 credits - which is 5p a copy - not too bad, but when oxfam is only next door and 2p a copy it's a bit annoying - especially as we can't take out the material from the resource centre. Also annoying as I might not finish a card before leaving..

JRUL copying operates on our uni ID cards. This year was a bit of a scam because the university gave everybody new cards due to a new admin system - if you had credit on your old card you had to queue ages to get it transferred so many didn't bother - the uni gets to keep hundreds of pounds worth of copying credit.

anewman

5p a sheet isn't bad for convenience, most printers/scanners or combined printer/scanner copier things will work out overall at much more than 5p per sheet. But really, cost doesn't matter that much unless you're copying 100 pages which between 2p and 5p would make the difference between £2 and £5. But I don't see why anyone should need to copy that many pages anyway. If you really need that many pages why not buy the book.

But some hints on saving money.

Nearly all photocopiers can reduce and enlarge. Therefore if you have a book where the 2 pages are bigger than A4, put the whole thing face down in the correct orientation of the A4 paper and select the reduce option.

Modern photocopiers have a memory facility letting you scan in pages and it can print them out. So say you have a load of A4 single sided pages, you can scan them all in one at a time, then the photocopier will put 2 A4 pages on to one A4 page when selecting the correct options. If you was a real scrouge you could aim for putting 4 a4 pages onto an a4 sheet depending on text size.

So get used to your photocopier's options and use them to your advantage to cut the photocopies needed to either a half or quarter.

lellie

I always print on both sides and often reduce things to 2 pages onto a page if it's single sheets. A lot of the things we copy from the resource centre are from rare books - ones our uni library doesn't even have and that are often out of print - the department copies long articles and essays for us if they're rare so we can all get copies of them - also important articles are placed in there to copy when there may only be one copy in the library and over 50 of us needing to read it. I quite often have to copy articles that are 60-70 pages long, so it does make a big difference.

freebie_junkie

my local oxfam do it for 3p and its also for a good cause.

if you have a dsa for learning difficulties youll get a photocopying allowance and an allowance for printer cartridges and paper and also for books so you might not have to photcopy so much