According
to statistics, our students printed more than 12 million pages
(black & white) in year 2005-06 inside the Computing Services
Centre (CSC). This is a new record! In fact, the demand for
laser printing has been increasing steadily in recent years
due to increased e-Learning activities. Without the space
to install extra laser printers, students will have to wait
longer for obtaining printouts. Furthermore, for study and
research purposes, some students do have genuine needs in
printing large volume of materials that the printing facilities
cannot satisfy at the moment. Hence, we see the need to set
up a charged laser printing service to supplement the existing
free printing facilities so that students can print urgent
jobs and large volume of materials quickly at reasonable costs,
when it is deemed necessary.
Although
black & white laser printing is the norm, we observed
that there is also a significant demand for colour laser printouts.
To simplify management and support, it is preferable to integrate
black & white printing and colour printing on a single
machine if the running costs for black & white printing
on black & white laser printer and colour printer are
comparable. As manpower is tight, our target is to source
a sophisticated print management system that integrates with
our computing environment as far as possible, and requires
least attention and minimal support effort. An OCTOPUS charging
system will be employed to accept payment, reducing the administration
work on handling cash transactions. This new charged laser
printing service will be launched in Semester A.