And with this demand, there are now many more options for colour printing in the office or in the home. Traditional offset printing for color still has its place, and a full service printer can offer services that you can't get any other way, such as bulk bindery work.

However, the threshold for where owning a color laser printer and doing the work in house has become consistently lower. There are more labour costs, and your cost per copy is going to go up compared to most traditional offset printers. On the other hand, you can print items on demand, and more than make up the difference on inventory taxes and stocking levels.

The usual point where break even happens is around 4,000 copies. If you're printing 4,000 copies of a given item, it's almost always better to go to an offset press for the job, though this will vary considerably by region and services offered.

When looking at the cost effectiveness of colour laser printing, you need to do a realistic assessment of how often it will be used by your organisation. In many cases, colour laser printers can be had for less than the cost of a single offset print job, but the question comes down to what will it be used for.

If you're a small publishing company, a colour laser printer makes perfect sense, because it allows you to release products with interior colour without having to buy 5,000 copies of it and store it in the warehouse, hoping it will sell. Higher end colour laser printers can handle interior color and even handle printing colour jackets for perfect bound books, and a glue binder is a relatively inexpensive piece of equipment.

If you're a smaller business that isn't doing publishing, the question comes down to whether or not the cost of the color printing can be rolled into the costs of the services or goods you're providing to your customers. In most cases, it can. Doing, for example, marketing brochures or website sales to clients are greatly enhances by handing colour printouts to them.

For larger businesses, the real question comes down to costs per page; these have dropped considerably in the last few years; they used to be about seven to ten times as expensive as a black and white laser printed page; they're now down to three to four times as expensive, which opens up a great deal of options for internal reports and external sales items.

In the end, the cost effectiveness of colour laser printers stems on what you'd use them for. They can be a useful adjunct for most any business if priced accordingly, however the real question comes down to "Will they generate more business?" either by enhancing services provided to clients, enabling products or services that would otherwise be unfeasible, or reducing your inventory costs and improving overhead.