A Procurement Manager's Six-Step Printer Buying Checklist: Kodak Step, RFID, Paper Sizes, and Fabric Printing

I'm a procurement manager at a 200-person logistics company. I've managed our printing supplies budget—about $120,000 annually for the last 7 years—negotiated with 20+ vendors, and documented every order in our cost tracking system. When I say more than 1,200 purchase orders, I do not mean just a few. I mean 1,200+ line items with a price, a vendor, and an approval sign-off. That experience taught me a simple lesson: the lowest quote almost never means the lowest cost.

This checklist is for people who buy printers for a team, not just one desk. Office managers, ops leads, IT buyers, finance folks—if you're about to approve an order for a Kodak Step instant printer, a Kodak photo printer mini, an RFID label printer, or even a basic office workhorse, this will help you avoid the mistakes that show up later on the invoice.

Here's the six-step checklist I use.

Step 1: Map what your team actually prints

Before you look at any printer, get a page count. Pull the print server logs or ask your IT person for the last 90 days. You want to know how many pages are plain letter vs. labels vs. photos. I'm not talking about going through every file. Just split it into three buckets: documents, media, and specialty.

• Documents – invoices, contracts, packing slips, mailing envelopes
• Media – photos, samples, fabric sheets
• Specialty – RFID labels, thermal labels, tags

This takes 20 minutes. Without it, you'll buy an all-in-one that sits idle while your team keeps emailing files to a print shop.

Step 2: Match the device to the media, not the other way around

If your field team needs to hand a customer a photo on the spot, a Kodak Step instant printer or Kodak photo printer mini is a legitimate business tool. But the printer is the cheap part. The media is the actual cost. I've seen teams get a portable photo printer for free, then spend more on media over a quarter than the printer would've cost if they'd bought it. Count the refills before you say yes.

For label printing, ask what the label needs to survive: a shelf, a cold room, a moving truck. That's more important than whether the label maker has a color screen. If you need asset tracking, jump to Step 5 before you make a decision.

Step 3: Lock down the normal printer paper size before you commit

This sounds basic, but it's where I got burned. I assumed standard paper meant the same thing everywhere. It doesn't.

The normal printer paper size for most U.S. businesses is letter: 8.5 × 11 inches. In international offices, it's A4: 210 × 297 mm, which is the ISO 216 standard. They're not interchangeable. A4 is taller and narrower. If your templates are built for letter and someone feeds A4, you get clipped margins and shifted logos.

Check every template before you buy. That includes mailing templates. Per USPS Business Mail 101, a standard letter-size envelope is up to 6.125 × 11.5 inches. A large envelope can go up to 12 × 15 inches. If you're printing direct mail, set those dimensions in your design file and do a test envelope before you order thousands.

Also remember: USPS pricing changes. As of January 2025, a 1-oz First-Class Mail letter is $0.73, and a 1-oz large envelope is $1.50. Source: usps.com/stamps. Verify current rates because USPS adjusts them about twice a year.

Step 4: Count the cost per printed page, not the machine price

Here's where the cost-controller side of me kicks in. A vendor quoted $600 for a printer. Another quoted $900. The $600 one looked great until I multiplied the expected monthly page volume by the cost of its ink cartridges. The expensive printer shipped with high-yield cartridges and a lower cost per page. Over 24 months, the $900 printer was about $1,800 cheaper to run.

People told me to check replacement ink before committing. I didn't. Now every printer approval uses the same calculator:

1. Device price
2. Ink or toner cost per page
3. Paper or media cost per page
4. Maintenance/repair allocation over 24 months

Even after we approved the higher-priced fleet, I kept second-guessing. What if the high-yield cartridge numbers were marketing fluff? I didn't fully relax until the first month's usage report matched the estimate.

If you're comparing a Kodak photo printer mini against another mini photo printer, don't just compare the printer retail price. Compare the per-print cost and whether the media is sold at the store your team will actually use.

Step 5: If you need asset tracking, test the RFID label printer in your environment

An RFID label printer is a specialty purchase. The label stock has inlays, the printer needs encoder settings, and your warehouse system has to talk to the database correctly. I assumed one would work out of the box with our WMS. It didn't. We had to buy compatible labels, tune the encoder, and update middleware. That cost us two weeks of setup and about double the integration budget I estimated.

So, before you buy any RFID label printer:

• Get a sample label printed and encoded in your facility, not just at the vendor's demo room.
• Ask for the full price list: printer, label stock, ribbon, and any software integration license.
• Test at least 500 labels. RFID readability is about placement on the product, not just the printer spec.

I'm not saying RFID label printers are a bad investment. For inventory tracking, they're a huge upgrade over counting boxes by hand. Just treat the pilot like a project, not a one-time purchase.

Step 6: Know how to print on fabric with an inkjet printer before you need it

This is the step most buyers ignore. Then one day, a sales manager asks for fabric samples with the logo, and someone says we can't just iron a piece of fabric through the printer. No.

But it doesn't have to be scary. If you have a flatbed inkjet or a printer with a straight-through feed, here's how to print on fabric with an inkjet printer:

1. Buy pre-treated fabric sheets cut to the normal printer paper size, or cut your own fabric and apply a fusible backing so it doesn't fray.
2. Set the printer driver to the fabric or photo matte setting. If you're unsure, do a test on plain paper first with the same layout.
3. Print one sheet at a time. Don't feed a stack—treated fabric has more friction than plain paper.
4. Let the ink dry fully. Then heat-set it with an iron according to the fabric sheet instructions. This makes the print wash-resistant.

That's the practical version. It's fine for samples, prototypes, and short-run promotional pieces. It's not a replacement for textile production.

Notes and common mistakes

Don't skip the media test. The proof is not the final product. I learned that after approving a label proof, then receiving a batch that looked nothing like what we approved. Now every quote includes a pre-production sample.

Don't buy based on max speed. A printer rated at 40 pages per minute means nothing if your team prints 200 pages a day in five separate jobs. Look at warm-up time, first-page-out time, and recurring misfeed rates. If a vendor won't give you a real-world benchmark, that's a red flag.

Be careful with environmental claims. If a paper vendor says a product is recyclable, that's an FTC Green Guide claim. Per FTC guidelines, it has to be truthful and substantiated. Ask for the documentation before you put it in your sustainability report.

Don't over-index on the brand. Kodak is a solid imaging brand, and the Kodak Step instant printer is a good fit for certain workflows. But a good brand doesn't automatically mean a good fit for your cost structure. Evaluate the device against your Step 1 map, not against the logo.

Bottom line: it took me 7 years and more than 1,200 purchase orders to understand that the right printer is the one your team will actually use, maintain, and pay to feed. The spec sheet tells you what a device can do. The cost calculator tells you what it'll do to your budget. Don't confuse the two.