Why Use a Color Photocopier?

Use a color photocopier whenever color provides important information.

With the more widespread availability of color photocopiers, photocopies are no longer limited to simple black and white. Although it may be tempting to simply use a color photocopier all the time, there are several factors you should consider when deciding whether to photocopy your documents in black and white or in color.

Preserving Information

If a document that was designed in color is copied in black and white, low-contrast text and images may become unreadable and confusing. When dealing with such documents, you should always make a single black-and-white copy and use that to decide whether the document should be copied in color instead.

Keeping Information Relevant

When photocopying documents containing pie charts or other graphs, you should always check whether the colors used in the graph provide important information that would be lost if the document was copied in black and white. For instance, colors that appear different in the original document may look so similar in a black-and-white copy that it leads to confusion. Similarly, when the text accompanying an image describes some details in the image itself by their color, copying the document in black and white would cause the text to lose relevance.

Making a Good Impression

Even if the document you are copying contains no important color-based information, a color copy of a document containing color looks better than a black-and-white one. Because of this, photocopying a color document in color can help make a good impression when the photocopies are handed out to superiors or potential customers.

Other Considerations

If you have a color photocopier available and cost is not an issue, there is little reason not to make copies in color rather than black and white. The only occasion where a black and white copy may look better than a color copy is if the document you are photocopying is black and white to begin with and contains no color information at all.