Printer with the fastest feed rate (not actual printing time)?

May 8, 2020 6:50 PM

I have a very large amount of papers that need to be counted, to the extent that doing it by hand will take dozens of hours. I have considered doing it by weight with an accurate scale, but I require a lot of accuracy, and some of the groupings of papers need to be separated, so I need to work in smaller batches. I was thinking of using a printer for this purpose - load up as much as it can hold, then "print" blank pages in groupings of 50 for example.

For this purpose, I can probably just get a used printer on ebay (I literally don't need it to even be able to print, just run through a center number of pages). However, I don't know what parameter I'm trying to optimize for. Typically, printers advertise a certain number of pages per minute. However, I'm not going to print anything on any of the pages, so it should run faster than this speed. How can I analyze the rate at which different printers will feed me blank paper (if such a performance characteristic exists)?

posted by unid41 to Technology (8 answers total)

You might want to check into photocopiers. I recently worked with a Canon to do a lawyer's thirty years of legal files, so, a similar sort of project. The Canon has a scanner top feed that counts the pages super fast and never jams. So you could put it in scan mode and just run it that way. I think my lawyer friend rented or leased his rather than purchasing, which included service tech support. I hope this is helpful information.
posted by effluvia at 7:11 PM on May 8, 2020 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you, this is helpful! I should have added - my budget is sub-$100 preferably (that's why I'm thinking of looking for used/refurb models on ebay), and I'm assuming you're not referring to desktop photocopiers but the larger types in offices.
posted by unid41 at 7:14 PM on May 8, 2020

Yes, the photocopier was a medium size office model. The Canon model worked much better than Xerox models I used to encounter in academia preparing for classes. Good luck with your project.
posted by effluvia at 7:30 PM on May 8, 2020

some of the groupings of papers need to be separated

I don't quite understand this parameter, but I used to work in a print shop, and when a count had to be accurate, we weighed it on a shipping scale. The scanner-as-counter trick is good, but scanners and printers double-pull pages all the time over large quantities, and with all blanks, you have little hope of catching it. Weights won't lie.
posted by teremala at 8:48 PM on May 8, 2020 [7 favorites]

Laser printers (which have high speeds) will not print blank pages appreciably faster than their stated rate. That rate is really the "not to exceed" rate, already assuming very little on the page. Plus you cannot run a printer at its stated rate for very long or it will overheat. Take your typical reliable but cheap Brother laser printer. The HL-2200 is rated at 21 pages per minute. But they recommend only 1,600 pages per month, with a maximum of 8,000 per month. What you pay for in workgroup or office printers is not speed, but duty cycle. I doubt you'd be able to get a huge number of pages through without wearing it out.
A piece of office paper weighs several grams, you'd be able to get an accurate count using a cheap gram scale that only costs $20. Even a .1 gram scale with a substantial capacity is pretty affordable, or you might be able to borrow one from a friend for an afternoon. Paper weight changes a bit with humidity, so check a test batch, but that's how I would do it.
posted by wnissen at 10:01 PM on May 8, 2020

> Weights won't lie.

I would add, if you're plopping say 20,000 pages on a scale, different types and weights of paper etc etc then you might have a somewhat large error bar on your number.

But if you're doing it in small batches anyway--batches where the paper type & weight is going to be quite consistent within each small batch--it seems like it would hard to beat the consistency and accuracy of a process like this:

- take a batch of say 10-500 pages which all appear to have matching types & weights of paper
- weigh a sample of say 5 or 10 pages counted by hand to get the weight per page
- weigh the whole batch, then a bit of math to get the page count
- If there weight comes out anywhere close to halfway in between two possible answers, split the batch in half, re-weigh a different sample of 5 sheets, etc etc etc until you get the measurement within a level of accuracy you are really confident in.

I'll bet if you did a few batches like this, verifying the page count by hand, you'd develop a pretty good amount of confidence in the result. You could also develop protocols to maximize accuracy, such as "always break down batches in to 250 pages or less."

Finally, a few overall points:

- Any count like this is going to have an error bar on it. Any count, any method. You can make the error bar larger or smaller but you're not going to eliminate it if this if more than say a couple thousand pages. Hand counts will have errors, and paper feed system potentially has errors--especially when dealing with a variety of paper sizes, weights, ages, etc etc etc. And the weighing process will have something of an error bar, too. ANYTHING you do will.

Point is it's realistic to think about making the error bar smaller but delusional and counterproductive to think you'll absolutely eliminate it.

Also, think about cross-checking a random sample of your results using a couple of different reliable methods.

- No printer you can buy for $100 or less is going to be 100% reliable in the paper feed department.

- Running pages of various weights, ages, construction etc etc etc through something like a laser printer or copier--particularly a sub-$100 model--is going to mangle some percentage of them--accordion fold-ups, maybe even ripped sheets etc. Just for example our $129 Brother laser printer is great but it has mangled maybe 5 sheets of 3000-4000 printed, fairly often pulls through 2 or 3 sheets at once in certain situations (paper tray low), and doesn't do well with certain weights and styles (glossy, etc) of paper. Extracting the jammed sheets often results in a ripped piece of paper.

No big deal with a blank piece of paper worth $0.02 but could be a problem if you can't tolerate loss or destruction of even a few pages of your source material?
posted by flug at 11:28 PM on May 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

I used to work in a print shop, and when a count had to be accurate, we weighed it on a shipping scale.

Same. Up to a surprisingly large quantity it was faster/easier to just count by hand (you quickly get good at counting in batches of five and can go through stacks of paper quickly), but above that the scale was used.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:42 AM on May 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

In my former law firm we would have done this by scanning or copying and applying bates labels. We had some copiers that did this directly, and we could do it in acrobat, and several other software pieces. It would ultimately put something on the image, but you can leave the originals blank?
posted by dpx.mfx at 9:01 AM on May 9, 2020