Long before the days when an A3 printer, cloud-based technology and digital displays were all an office needed, the photocopier was one of the most sought after IT products for the workplace. This is hard to remember for some people and many of the younger generation will have never known just how vital these machines really were. Photocopiers were used throughout the workplace, in schools and offices around the world, and they really did bring with them a wide range of benefits which became critical when it came to productivity and efficiency. This is how the photocopier made such a difference in the workplace.
Hand-Crafted
It is all well and good thinking that photocopiers weren’t needed because we had printers, but we have to consider the fact that tasks weren’t completed on computers in the same way as they are these days. With so many documents, ideas and creative designs done by hand, on paper, the photocopier became the best way to reproduce these kind of documents on a large scale. Within the creative world in particular, this was a key component to sharing ideas and designs.
Increased Speed
Even when compared to printers, the speed of the photocopier was what made it such an important machine within offices all over the world. Unlike a computer, a photocopier was taking a single image which could be scanned, and then it simply had to reproduce those images multiple times. A printer would continuously scan the data on the computer in order to deliver those copies. Speed in business is of course critical to efficiency and productivity, which is why so many loved what the photocopier brought to the workplace.
Increased Quality
As photocopiers improved, they were combined with laser printing capabilities. What offices began to see was that they could take hand-drawn or single documents, and reproduce them to a much higher quality than the original. This was an important step for many companies and it helped them to increase the look of those documents.
Mass Copying
In a further boost to productivity, workers could set the photocopier to reproduce hundreds of copies of a document, or multiple documents in fact, and then go about their work. You can also buy printer ink bulk. This freed up so many minutes of time and prevented workers from facing any delays to their job through the copying or printing process.
User Friendly
Arguably one of the best aspects of a photocopier was that they were so simple to use. These machines required very little by way of training, given the fact that they only had one or two functions which workers had to learn. We have to remember that not everyone was au fait with using computers, which meant that teaching someone how to print documents required more time invested in them. Someone could find their way around a photocopier in no time at all, making the lives of employee and employer significantly easier.
Times have changed of course, but we should always remember just how important these machines once were.