A colour copier is an office machine that prints in full colour rather than black and white. It is used to produce marketing materials, presentations, brochures and flyers. They also enable companies to print documents quickly and cheaply in house rather than outsourcing the work to a professional printer.
Creating a copy or print requires the use of four toner colours – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK). The document is placed on an electrostatic drum that holds a negative electrical charge. Toner is then transferred from the drum to the paper through heat and pressure rollers. The resulting toner image is fused onto the paper and the result is a copy of the original document.
The first commercially available color copier was the 3M Color-in-Color, followed by the Xerox 6500 in 1973. These machines required special paper and were slow, but they produced quality results.
Some governments are concerned that people can use a color copier to counterfeit money or documents. Several anti-counterfeiting technologies have been developed, including watermarks, microprinting, holograms and tiny security strips.
Often, small businesses will purchase a multifunction copier that can perform a variety of functions such as printing, scanning, faxing and even emailing documents. This enables a business to reduce the amount of paper they need to store and transport and can help digitise their document workflow. Our reviews of 10 top colour copiers show that most offer Gigabit Ethernet network ports and some have wireless networking capabilities.