Hewlett-Packard takes color laser printing to new heights

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): At about this time of the year, Hewlett-Packard often introduces new products and nice surprises. At Shangri-La Hotel here last month the company again demonstrated its adherence to this strong tradition.

Since I bought my HP LaserJet IIIP, which is still working, HP has been cutting its products' prices drastically each time it releases new printers, scanners, PCs, etc.

The Enhanced Color LaserJet 5 Series is among its latest products, which you will probably be reading more about in the next few weeks.

On color laser printers, most of us used to feel completely hopeless because we knew their prices would start from Rp 14 million (US$5,766). At this price, it would be out of the question for us to justify such an investment. But last month HP boldly slashed the price of its Color LaserJet 5 by more than 30 percent, making it more affordable. At the higher end, the Color LaserJet 5M already has network capability, Postscript Level-2 and 36 MB of RAM. Medium-sized businesses can now join their big brothers in going color.

What makes this news so exciting? First of all, we all like color. Life is more exciting in color, and communication will be more effective in color.

Because of HP's aggressive price reduction, other color laser printer makers will have no choice but to reduce prices. Once again the color laser printer industry is going through a shakeout and we, the end-users, are always the ultimate beneficiaries.

By the way, if you're an early adopter and already have the earlier version of HP Color LaserJet 5, you can upgrade it for enhanced capability: HP has an upgrade kit available. But, if you have the original Color LaserJet, you're out of luck because the kit cannot be used for it, and the effort and the cost wouldn't be worth while.

Beyond DPI

HP has never been a leader at increasing dots per inch (DPI). While other color printer makers are glorifying their 1,200 DPI printing resolutions, HP is sticking to 300 DPI. But HP's engineers have compensated this low resolution with more detailed images and richer color. The result is a color printout that can look better than many of the other printers that boast higher DPI.

Equally important is that the fewer picture elements that you have to print, the less the time your printer will need to print each page. For a higher resolution printout -- let's say 1200 DPI -- you will need a four times faster processor to print within a time comparable to a low resolution printer. You will also need a lot of memory to store high resolution image files. Therefore, as long as image details are high, low resolution printing will be preferable since it means faster printing and cheaper machines.

How are richer color printouts achieved? Basically, there are two different printer methods to produce colors. The first method is called dithering; the colors are created by putting dots of different but limited colors adjacent to each other on the page to give an illusion of many different colors. This method will yield a printout that doesn't look very detailed. The other method, which is the one that HP applies in its Color LaserJet 5, consists of mixing the four basic colors -- cyan, yellow, magenta and black -- in precise amounts. This will result in millions of different solid colors. When these blended dots are applied to the page, the result will look crisper and more detailed.

Speed is of prime importance, too. To print bitmap images even faster, the Enhanced Color LaserJet 5 also comes with CLJ5FR, which basically follows the trend of freeing processors from the chore of formatting images inside the computer. This software feature lets the processor process bitmap images before they are sent to the printer. HP claims that, since we now have faster CPUs, bitmap images can be printed up to five times faster. Examples of bitmap files are the image files that you have scanned, downloaded from the Internet, or shot with a digital camera.

And speaking of digital cameras, of which HP now has one, today's printers seem to be geared up towards digital photography. If you buy a new printer, it has the capability of producing photo-quality printouts. And, while the prices of digital cameras are still expensive, the printers -- like the DeskJet 690 -- tend to be very affordable.

As color printing becomes more pervasive, being able to print a hundred or so flyers in house is bonus. There are several choices. We can create flyers on a desktop PC and take the file to a professional printer for printing. If we do this, we must print a large volume to get a good price. The more we print, the cheaper the flyer. The problem is that, if we have too many pages to print at once, we may end up with stacks of flyers or catalogs that may not be distributed. Besides, going to professional printers is time consuming.

Our next option is to use the color inkjet printers sitting on our desks. But such printers are not designed for high-speed and high-volume printing. As the four HP 850Cs in my office prove, the paper pick-up mechanism will struggle and other components will die early. We need a printer with a higher duty cycle for printing hundreds of flyers and catalogs.

Now, if we have a fairly fast color laser printer, we can print as many pages as necessary. If it turns out that we need more, we print more pages. With this printing on demand approach, we can avoid having stacks of printed materials that may never be distributed.

Furthermore, laser printers are faster than inkjet printers, which have print heads that must slide from side to side spraying ink over the width of pages. But laser printers use direct-to- drum imaging technology which usually requires a single pass to transfer the toner particles from the drum onto the paper.

Laser printing technology is more robust, too. If you look at the spec sheet of this printer, for instance, you'll read: "Duty cycle is 30,000 pages per month." This means that the printer is expected to be able to print up to this many pages a month without components wearing out excessively. Come to think of it, to print 30,000 pages a month you would have to print a thousand pages a day. This means 400 pages an hour, which the printer simply cannot produce. In fact, no color laser printer has been able to do it.

Finally, the main reason for having a color laser printer for creating your business flyers and catalogs is that color laser toners are cheaper than ink for inkjet printers. Many people might see this as contradictory because they can get an inkjet cartridge for less than a third of the price of a laser toner cartridge. What they forget is that laser toner cartridges print far more pages than inkjet toner cartridges.

Incidentally, if you're new to color printing and aren't really sure which colors to pick for your pie charts or your slide presentations, take heart because HP bundles its LaserJet printer with a CD titled Jazzing up with Colors. It contains tools and software that will help you create stunning and professional presentations. It includes software such as By Design and HP Color Tools for novices and experienced color users.