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Mon, 22 Oct 2001

JP/A slew of new products now on offer from the big three

A slew of new products now on offer from the big three

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta , zatni@cbn.net.id

The week of Oct. 8 was a busy one for Jakarta's IT journalists and printer makers alike. Canon held a press conference on Wednesday, followed by Epson on Thursday and Hewlett-Packard on Friday. There is simply no space for me to go through each of the great products that these three competing companies were introducing. I thought I would just give a rundown of what they were and hope that I will be able to test drive some of the best. New Printers

Canon, which is reportedly still controlling the largest market share of inkjet printers in Indonesia, tried to maintain its dominance through the introduction of a new one as we entered the Q4. The S400SP is their new Super Printer that promises lower cost of consumables. Its Super Economy mode uses one-fourth of the ink compared to the model that it replaced. The print result was grayish text, of course, but still very readable. Speed has also been improved, as this US$118 printer, which can also be fitted with a scanner cartridge, is able to print 9 pages per minute (ppm) in B/W or 4 ppm in color.

The ThinkTank, Canon's ink storage system that used to be found only in their mid- and high-end printers, is also used in this new printer.

Epson introduced three new inkjet printers, namely, the Stylus C60, Stylus C80 and Stylus Photo 810. The C80 is particularly notable, as it is perhaps the fastest inkjet printer today. It can print 20 ppm. It also uses water-resistant, lightfast and pigment-based ink instead of dye-based. It also has all the current print technologies developed by Epson, such as the Micro Piezzo print head and the 3-picoliter Ultra Micro dot. Even the lower end, the 12-ppm C60, can print with a maximum resolution of 2880 x 720. The $215 Stylus Photo 810, which has the same level of maximum resolution and uses six color inks, is actually a Stylus Photo 895 with the ability to print photos directly from a compact flash. Clearly it is intended for the home digital photo enthusiasts.

HP also brought five new DeskJets and a new personal LaserJet to the market. The inkjet printers were three DeskJet 900 Series, DeskJet 656 and DeskJet 845. Common to DeskJet 920C, 948C and 960C are the PhotoREt 3 Color Layering Technology for realistic, photo-quality prints, ColorSmart 3 for automatic color adjustment and a maximum resolution of 2400 x 1200 on premium photo paper.

New to DeskJet 920C is the low-ink indicator. DeskJet 948C has an optional duplex printing accessory that allows us to automatically print on both sides of a page. DeskJet 960C features HP's new Paper Type Sensor. With this sensor, the printer will detect what kind of paper we feed into it and will automatically adjust the print settings accordingly for the best result. Its maximum print speeds are 15 ppm for B/W and 12 ppm for color.

The LaserJet 1000 prints at 10 ppm speed with an estimated cost of 2.5 cents per page and it has a duty cycle of 7000 pages per month. New Scanners

Epson also launched two new scanners two weeks ago. These were the Epson Perfection 1650 and Perfection 1250. These mid-range scanners come with Epson's technologies such as Micro Step Drive, Simultaneous RGB Scanning and Dynamic Range Control. The higher- end 1600-DPI and 48-bit Perfection 1650, which has photo scanning capability, also features new technologies such as Matrix Charge Coupled Device (CCD), On-demand Pixel Optimization and Precision Optical Lenses.

Hewlett-Packard's capable scanner, ScanJet 5470c, can scan with a maximum resolution of 2400 DPI with 48-bit color depth. It comes with active transparency adapter that allows us to scan negatives and films. More notable is that it can scan directly to CD so that, if we have a CD-Writer, we can archive images on CD- ROMs. It also has a Photo-reprint button that will scan and arrange photos into wallet-sized prints or 4x6 inch size on a single page. These two features, along with the use of HP's own Dual Sensor CCD technology, are also available in ScanJet 5400c and the 1200 DPI ScanJet 4400c. The lower end ScanJet 2200c scans with a maximum resolution of 600 DPI with 42-bit color depth. It can scan 3-D objects as well.

What else was there? HP also introduced three DesignJet printers for graphics professionals that require accurate colors. These were the DesignJet 10ps, 20ps and 50ps. HP also showcased its first DVD-Writer/CD-Writer, which will enable us to burn our own DVDs and CDs. And, to top these all, HP also announced new lines of business PCs, which we will look at next week.