New hardware products from Japan
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): Our friends in the page layout department of The Jakarta Post added "(mis)" before the word "adventure" that I used in the title of my article last week. The ripple it created was quite significant. A handful of e-mail messages have arrived in my box, expressing their condolences. A friend in Britain even thought my article was, as she put it, quite "emotional".
The truth was I had a lot fun with the hardware adventure the entire week. True, I lost a modem in the process, but now I am enjoying a faster Internet connection. What a difference the prefix (mis) made!
Anyway, in this week's column we will look at several new and interesting products from a Japanese company renowned for the large number of patents that it holds. About two weeks ago, PT Datascript, Canon's distributor for Indonesia, unveiled a sleek digital camera, a pair of new printers, a couple of flatbed color scanners and a color laser printer cum copier, which were worth taking a look at.
Digital cameras
A recent PC Magazine Online survey found that 35 percent of respondents said they were ready to buy a digital camera now, 39 percent said that they would buy on next year and only 9 percent said they had no interest in digital cameras.
What does this mean? Clearly, computer users are accepting digital cameras more than ever before.
No wonder companies like Olympus, Sony, Ricoh, Hitachi, Sharp, Toshiba, Canon, Kodak, Epson and so many others are jumping onto the digital camera bandwagon, regardless of whether they have the tradition of camera crafting in the past or not. The quality of digital cameras has improved tremendously since I first tested a Logitech digital camera a few years ago. Unfortunately, the prices are moving to the south more slowly than we would like.
Canon, with a strong tradition in camera technology, has been making great cameras. In the past, its PowerShot A5 won a couple of awards from computer magazines. During a new product launch at Hotel Horison, Ancol, two weeks ago, they introduced an update to the beautifully crafted camera PowerShot A50. I requested a test unit of this Rp 5.2 million megapixel gadget, and you will certainly read about it after I have played around with it.
Scanners
In the past, scanners had to be quite tall because the Charge- coupled Device (CCD) used to capture the image and create the digital data incorporates a complex configuration of mirrors and lenses. Today, new technology based on newer Contact Image Sensor (CIS) technology using Light Emitting Diode (LED) makes the use of mirrors and lenses no longer necessary. Therefore, scanners can be made very thin and very light, like the scanners from Canon. In Canon's lingo, the technology is called LED Indirect Exposure, or LIDE.
Four models are available from this company: FB 330P, FB 630P, FB 630U and the FB 636U. The "P" indicates that the scanner connects to the PC through the parallel port, and the "U" means it has a USB interface. With USB, the scanner can be used with a Mac as well.
The resolution capability of the 330P is 300 by 600 DPI, while the FB 630P and FB 636U can scan at the 600 by 1200 DPI level. One thing that impressed me was the lightness of these scanners. My nine-year-old HP ScanJet IIC feels like a behemoth compared to them.
These CIS-based scanners are good for personal use and small offices that need to scan pictures to incorporate graphics in their brochures and catalogs. For better scan quality, however, the CCD-based scanners are generally still a better bet.
Canon has also been the pioneer in document management, and it has introduced two high-speed document scanners that will turn your stacks of paper documents into digital images that you can save on CD-ROMs.
You can feed up to 500 sheets of letter-sized or even A3-sized documents into the tray of DR-5020 or DR 5080C Document Scanners, and they will be scanned at the speed of up to 100 pages per minute. The DR 5080C can scan and store the image in up to 24-bit color. With these devices, there should be no more excuse to keep those stacks of dusty and damp paper documents in the storage rooms of our government offices.
Printers
We all know that Canon makes decent inkjet printers. Being the maker of a very popular printing engine in the world, this company understandably makes its own laser printers, too. In fact, one of the highlights of the product introduction that afternoon was CP660, a color laser printer and copier.
Looking more like a copying machine than a printer, this color laser printer can print 24 pages per minute (ppm) in black and white or 6 ppm in color. A 100Base-T network port is available, so that the printer can be used in a network as well.
To temporarily store data that may flow in from multiple users, a 2.1 GB hard disk is standard. A new type of toner is also used; it has a microscopic wax core that makes the fusing process free of oil and the output non-glossy on paper from A5 to A3 in size.
The good news is that this printer carries a hefty price tag, Rp 110 million. That makes it not so attractive for money counterfeiters who have been creating a heavy burden for our economy in the past few years. A color laser printer is a good solution for companies that need to print small volumes of high- quality communication materials.
In the inkjet printer area, two new models were introduced, BJC-2000SP and BJC-5100SP. These SP printers are equipped with the capability to print in what the company calls Super Economy mode, using only one-fourth of ink compared with the professional-quality mode.
It can also be turned into a scanner just by changing the toner cartridge with a special scanner cartridge. I test-drove a Canon BJC 4310SP in the past and found that, while the printing quality was acceptable, you would still be wiser to invest in a low-cost flatbed scanner.
The BJC 5100SP can print up to A3-size with the speed up to 10 ppm in black and white and 4 ppm in color. You can even use special 7-color toner combination for photo-realistic prints at a resolution of 1440x720DPI.
The choice in inkjet printers in our local market, which has been traditionally dominated by the three big players Canon, Epson and Hewlett-Packard, has been made wider by the arrival of another leading brand, Lexmark. We will take a look at Lexmark offerings in an upcoming article.