HP started tiered pricing with their Edgeline product. With low enough color density your expense per color page could be as low as that of a black print. If the color increased you fell into the accent color range or professional color range, and were charged accordingly.
The tiered approach had a lot of fans on both sides of the transaction. The vendor selling the CPP had great comfort that they were being fairly compensated for the quantity of supplies they would be providing. The users of the product were comfortable that they weren’t paying too much for color prints, particularly on those documents with only a few words in color.
We’ll have to wait to see what path HP takes with the development of the Edgeline. Now that Xerox has entered the tiered color pricing game other OEMs are sure to follow. The link below will take you to an article on Xerox’s new ColorQube 9200 series and the “Hybrid” pricing approach.
http://socialcomputing.ulitzer.com/node/952771
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