Unless it's debt, your waist size or egos, life continually deals us one simple truth: bigger is better. The same is precisely true when it comes to print output. As much as we may all hate to admit it, we see size as a reflection of quality, which is why there's evidence to suggest that producing a sales pitch on A3 increases your chance of making the sale by as much as a fifth.
Buy an A3 printer for your office and you can keep benefitting from the size effect again and again and again. If management need to communicate a message to employees, a well-designed A3 poster is 66% more likely to grab their attention according to the same study (by Professor Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire).
There are other business benefits too. Let's say you need to create a new website. By switching from A4 to A3, you can map out the user journey from start to finish all without compromising on font size, as is often a problem if you're restricted to A4.
There's another major plus to consider by having everything you need to create compelling, professional marketing materials in your own office. Unless you're in charge of team of geniuses, it's highly unlikely that your first attempt will be perfect and it's only when you print something out and take a cold, clinical look at it that you can tell.
By having the printer sitting a few feet away, you can quickly make changes or create different versions to look at side by side without having to wait for a repro house to make them or compromise on quality by shrinking them down to A4. Or, worse still, looking at them on-screen.
There are yet more benefits if your team designs printed products such as brochures, newsletters and even full-blown magazines. Being able to view layouts at 100% can make it immediately obvious whether or not a design is working and whether text is readable or not.
By contrast, if you stick with A4 then you'll have to shrink the page to fit your printer's capabilities, which will typically mean fonts and images are printed at around 90% size.
Plus, by massively reducing the cost of creating your own posters and other materials, you'll be giving your team license to experiment in a way they never can if they're aware that every print costs 15.
Whilst on the topic of money, we should immediately dash another misconception: you can now buy a business printer, able to print A3 documents (and larger), for under 100.
In particular, the HP OfficeJet 7510 Wide Format All-in-One Printer costs 83 exc VAT (99 inc VAT), and comes complete with a LAN port as well as the ubiquitous Wi-Fi connectivity. Right now, you can even claim a three-year warranty and 20 cashback.
As the photo above shows, you can even print borderless A3 marketing materials with the HP OfficeJet 7510. And the cost per page is going to be massively less than heading to a repro shop. For instance, the high-yield colour cartridges, which last for around 825 pages at 5% coverage, cost 10 inc VAT.
Naturally, you're buying all the versatility of a modern-day multifunction printer too. If you have an old-style copier in your office then take note of the automatic document feeder and 600 x 1,200dpi scanner.
As with all recent HP printers, printing from a mobile device is simple. Whether you're at home, work or enjoying a latt in your favourite caf, you can easily print from your phone or tablet using the HP ePrint app.
At the opposite end of the scale, you might be standing right next to the printer and wanting to scan in a document. Rather than go through the laborious process of saving it, you can use the colour touchscreen to send the email straight to yourself or anyone else on your list.
If you're printing a confidential document, you might also want to take advantage of the USB port, conveniently located at the front of the printer: you can print or scan directly from a memory stick. Want to scan an existing document and send the image to the stick? No problem, you can do that too.
Our last comment almost goes without saying but we'll say it anyway. Precisely as you'd expect from an HP inkjet, the text quality, graphics and photos are top notch.
In short, the HP OfficeJet 7510 offers an excellent introduction to the world of A3 colour printing. Whichever printer you choose, however, give it a go and discover the business benefits of A3 for yourself.
