When you’re looking for a copier, reps bury you under a mountain of specifications for each one. They show you all the “speeds and feeds,” but you don’t know where to go with this data.

However, there is one specification copier reps don’t talk about, and that’s the one we will cover today.

The “Mystery” Specification That Means Everything for Your Office Productivity

Many copier reps will talk about a copier’s print speed, but there’s one crucial variable they leave out: How long does it take for that copier to warm up and print?

Warm-up time is the amount of time a copier takes to warm up and produce a copy, from the time you place a piece of paper on the scanner and press the start button to the time a copy lands in the tray. A copier could print 500 copies per minute, but it can’t produce a single print until it warms up.

How Much of an Impact Does Warm Up Speed Have on Productivity?

If you look at a typical office, it will have a copier, but if it’s not being used consistently, it will cool down. Once this cooldown happens, you will have to wait until it warms up until you can use it again.

Copier speed comes into play in a big way here. If you have two copiers side-by-side and start them both cold, the “copier speed” doesn’t matter. The copier with the faster copier speed will print out all of its copies before the one with the “faster copier speed” has a chance to print out its first copy.

Usually, copiers with a high copier speed also cost more money. Ironically, if you pick a copier with a slower copier speed, but a faster warm-up time, you could have a copier that not only prints faster, but also costs less money.

If You Aren’t Printing Multiple Times an Hour, Take the Copier With the Faster Warm Up Time.

Some customers are put off by having a smaller copier, but these smaller copiers have the fastest warm-up time; they will most likely give you faster prints than the larger, more expensive copiers.

If you are printing hundreds of prints every hour, then copier speed may be an essential metric to look at. However, this scenario usually doesn’t happen. Take note of how many prints you make on an hourly basis and take the copier that works best for you from what you see.