Uptown Business Machines

Uptown Business Machines Uptown Business Machines. Office copiers, printers and managed print for Surrey, White Rock, Langley, Delta and the Lower Mainland. ubmcanada.com

Honest advice across Kyocera, Xerox, Epson and HP. Toner AutoPilot sends supplies before you run out. Sales and Service of printers and multifunction printers for business. We sell primarily Kyocera, Xerox, Epson and HP office printers as well as business computers from Lenovo, Microsoft, Asus and Acer. We offer automated toner options as well as toner & ink from HP, Xerox, Lexmark, Canon, Kyocera, Epson and Brother at competitive rates.

That is a Kyocera TASKalfa 308ci in a customer's office. It has been there coming up on a year now, it does what they ne...
09/10/2026

That is a Kyocera TASKalfa 308ci in a customer's office. It has been there coming up on a year now, it does what they need every day, and they are happy with it. There is no drama in that, which is rather the point.

It is worth talking about because of where it sits. Most offices believe there are two choices. A desktop multifunction, which is inexpensive to buy and will struggle the moment the work gets real. Or a full size photocopier, which for a lot of offices is more machine than the work asks for.

This one is the crossover between the two, and the middle is where most small offices actually belong. You get the performance of a full size copier and something close to its cost per page. The print quality is outstanding and it is still outstanding on the hundredth page. The scanning is quick, which matters more than people expect, because in most offices the machine scans more than it prints. And you choose the features you want rather than paying for a specification somebody else decided on.

The arithmetic points the same way. A colour page on a desktop machine runs somewhere between twenty three and twenty five cents once you count four cartridges instead of one. At five hundred colour pages a month that is well over a hundred dollars in cartridges alone, before paper and before the printer itself. That is roughly where leasing the middle machine starts to win, and it keeps winning from there, with the toner and the service already inside the rate.

Right tool for the right job. It is the oldest idea in business, and it still decides this one.

What is your office running today, and is it the machine you would choose if you were choosing now?

Adam, Uptown Business Machines

There is a setting on almost every office printer that is quietly costing money, and it is not the one people expect.Mos...
09/08/2026

There is a setting on almost every office printer that is quietly costing money, and it is not the one people expect.

Most offices, when they go looking for savings, turn on double sided printing. It is worth doing and it halves the paper. But I will be straight with you: on a cost per page agreement it does not lower the printing charge, because two sides is still two pages. What it saves is paper, storage, postage and filing space. Real money, just not where people think it is.

The setting that does move the printing cost is the colour default. On most machines, if colour is available it is on, and the machine has no way of knowing you did not mean it. A memo with the company logo in the corner and one blue heading gets billed as a colour page, the same as a full page photograph. Nobody chose that. It simply happens all day, on every document that came out of a template somebody built three years ago.

The usual advice is to default the driver to black and white and leave colour as the deliberate choice. That works, and it takes about five minutes.

There is a better answer though, and it comes down to the machine rather than the setting. Kyocera's colour machines bill colour in three tiers, by how much colour is actually on the page. That memo with the logo is Simple Color, the lowest tier. Graphs and charts are Business Color. A brochure or a presentation is Creative Color. You only pay for the colour you actually use, so nobody has to police the printer and nobody has to choose between colour and cost.

Which is the same point from two directions. Settings help on any machine. The machine you chose decides how much they have to.

When did anyone last look at what your printer does by default?

Adam, Uptown Business Machines

Every September the phone gets busy.The machines were idle through the summer and so were the people. Then everyone is b...
09/03/2026

Every September the phone gets busy.

The machines were idle through the summer and so were the people. Then everyone is back in the same week, the volume goes straight up, and things start showing themselves. Some of it is simply a machine that sat quiet for two months and wants attention. Some of it is a habit nobody had to think about in July. And some of it is the one that costs the most, which is an office discovering the machine was never really big enough for the work, and that the quiet months had been hiding it.

That last one is not a fault in the machine. It is a class of machine. A consumer printer is designed around a low purchase price, and the return comes back through the cartridge. A business machine is designed around the cost of the page, so the cartridge is larger, the drum lasts longer, and the parts are meant to be replaced rather than thrown away with the machine.

Here is the part that does not appear on the box. Rated cartridge yields assume five percent of the page is covered in toner. Real offices run closer to six or seven. So the cost per page on the box is the best case, and the real number lands twenty to forty percent higher. On a small desktop laser that puts you near four or five cents a page. On a business machine like the ECOSYS MA5500ifx, the one we place most often, it is closer to a cent and a bit. At three thousand pages a month, that is most of a hundred dollars every month for the same work.

It isn't to say the small printer is the wrong buy. For a two person office printing a few hundred pages a month it is often exactly right. It is simply that the arithmetic changes quickly with volume, and most offices never go back and check it.

What does your office actually print in a month, and has anyone ever put a cost per page against it?

Adam, Uptown Business Machines

Fall budgets get set over the next few weeks, and the print line is usually the one nobody looks at closely.Three things...
09/01/2026

Fall budgets get set over the next few weeks, and the print line is usually the one nobody looks at closely.

Three things are worth checking on any print invoice, whoever it comes from. First, is the service cost quoted separately from the equipment cost, or are the two rolled into one number. Rolled together, you cannot tell what you are paying for either one. Second, what is the rate per page, and is colour billed at a single rate regardless of how much colour is actually on the page. Third, what happens in a heavy month. On a cost per page agreement the bill follows your actual printing, so a busy month costs more and a quiet month costs less. That is how it should read. A print bill that never moves at all is worth a question.

We quote service and equipment as two separate numbers for exactly this reason. It makes us easier to compare and harder to hide behind, which is the point.

When your print invoice arrives, can you tell which part is the machine and which part is the service?

Adam, Uptown Business Machines

HP is ending an instant rebate on four of its LaserJet models on Monday August 31. On Tuesday September 1 those four go ...
08/28/2026

HP is ending an instant rebate on four of its LaserJet models on Monday August 31. On Tuesday September 1 those four go back to their regular price.

They are the LaserJet Pro 4001dn, the Color LaserJet Pro 4201dn and the 4201dw, and the Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4301fdw. All four are workgroup machines, the sort of printer an office of five to fifty people actually leans on day after day, rather than a consumer class unit that runs well for a while and then starts to fade.

We have no say in the date. HP sets the promotion window and HP closes it, and the price goes back up whether or not anyone was ready. So if one of these was already on the list for the fall, it is worth a look this week rather than next.

Current pricing sits on each machine's page at UBMCanada.com. If you would like a hand working out which of the four suits your office, please call us at 778-291-2849 and we are glad to go through it with you.

Nearly every boardroom I visit has the same drawer. Cables, adapters, dongles, each one bought to solve one urgent meeti...
08/27/2026

Nearly every boardroom I visit has the same drawer. Cables, adapters, dongles, each one bought to solve one urgent meeting, and together they are the reason the room takes five minutes to start.

DTEN was the first device I saw that emptied that drawer honestly. One unit on the wall, one touch to join, and it works with the meeting platforms you already use. We sell it and support it with the same local team that looks after your print fleet.

How many adapters live in your boardroom drawer right now? Be honest, I have seen some impressive collections.

Your boardroom probably works fine for the people in it every day. They know which cable goes where and which seat the m...
08/27/2026

Your boardroom probably works fine for the people in it every day. They know which cable goes where and which seat the microphone can actually hear.

Then a client presentation comes along, the first five minutes go to plugging things in, and the polished part of the meeting starts from behind.

It isn't to say a better screen wins you the work. It is simply that the room should never be the reason a strong presentation lands weak.

Have you ever joined a call from the other end, just to see what your clients see?

A proud moment from this week. We installed a Xerox AltaLink C8255 for a Vancouver office, and the crowd favourite was t...
08/21/2026

A proud moment from this week. We installed a Xerox AltaLink C8255 for a Vancouver office, and the crowd favourite was the finisher, not the screen.

Fifty five pages a minute, and every page can come out folded, stapled, and hole punched. Board packages and client binders arrive in the tray ready to hand over, and nobody spends their morning at the lunch table collating.

Like everything we place, it is looked after on our managed print service, with one simple rate for every page and supplies that arrive on their own.

Who does the folding and stapling in your office when a big package has to go out?

This is a SureColor T3170x we delivered and set up at a customer site this year. Twenty four inch drawings, and it turns...
08/18/2026

This is a SureColor T3170x we delivered and set up at a customer site this year. Twenty four inch drawings, and it turns out a full size sheet in 34 seconds.

The part I like most is the ink. It refills from bottles instead of cartridges, and it comes with two full sets in the box. Nobody is hunting for a cartridge at four o'clock on a Friday.

It carries a one year replacement warranty and we recommend taking it to five years, which is far better value bought with the machine than thought about later.

We deliver it, set it up, install it, and keep the paper and ink arriving, which is really the reason to buy something like this from someone local.

If you send drawings out to a print shop, how many sheets a month is it?

Every printer has two prices. The one on the box, and the one you pay per page after that.The second one takes about two...
08/17/2026

Every printer has two prices. The one on the box, and the one you pay per page after that.

The second one takes about two minutes to work out. Cartridge price divided by the pages the cartridge is rated for. That is your cost per page, and it is the number that tells you whether a printer suits the amount you actually print.

A small desktop laser printing a few hundred pages a month is often exactly the right machine. The same machine asked to print a few thousand pages a month gets expensive, not because anything is wrong with it, but because it was built for a different job.

I wrote up the full arithmetic with real Canadian prices on our site: https://ubmcanada.com/blog/inexpensive-printer-cost-per-page/

Do you know what a page costs you on your office printer? Send me the make and model and roughly what you print in a month, and I am glad to work it out for you. No charge.

Address

404/1688 152nd Street
White Rock, BC
V4A4N2

Opening Hours

Monday 8am - 5pm
Tuesday 8am - 5pm
Wednesday 8am - 5pm
Thursday 8am - 5pm
Friday 8am - 5pm

Telephone

7782912849

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Uptown Business Machines posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share