New imaging products after the megamerger

New imaging products after the megamerger

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

With the finishing touches still being put on their mega merger,
I did not expect HP to be able to release new imaging products,
such as printers and scanners, even though it was high time they
did. I was pleasantly surprised when HP recently launched a slew
of interesting new products for the fall season.

The first thing I noticed at their exhibition in Plaza Senayan
late last month was that HP finally chose to separate the print
head from the ink tanks in more of its printer models,
particularly the Photosmarts. The separation had been repeatedly
suggested to the company for a long time, but it always seemed
that they were dragging their feet in following industry trends.
By detaching the print heads from the tanks, the cost of
consumable ink will be lower. While there is no guarantee that
the price that we actually have to pay will indeed be lower, at
least the step will help us avoid having to throw away good
component parts that we can still use.

The next thing is that the designs of new imaging products
have largely been updated. Nowadays, even the toaster no longer
comes as a shiny metal box. Similarly, these new printers and
scanners have a more curvaceous appearance. More "millennium"
colors are also being used for the printer and scanner housings,
making the beige and bluish gray colors two things of the past.
* New Printers

Choosing a new printer to buy has obviously not gotten easier.
We really need to know what we are going to use it for. While the
great news is that today's printer can do almost anything,
including churning out color documents, presentation slides and
photos, we need to define our main requirements more
specifically. The reason is that the printers, such as the ones
showcased by HP last month, come with a wide range of
technologies and features.

HP has just introduced one multifunction laser printer, three
Photosmart printers, and four DeskJet printers. Each of them will
perform specific tasks better than others. Multifunction
printers, which can print, scan, copy and fax documents, for
example, will be the right choice for an office environment,
especially when space is limited. The newest multifunction
printer introduced by HP for the local market is the all-in-one
LaserJet 3330.

This US$700 printer can print up to 15 pages per minute, which
makes it a good choice for a small office or work group. Because
it is a laser printer, the cost to print is quite reasonable --
2.4 cents per page. It comes with an automatic document feeder
(ADF), and it also has a 10,000 duty cycle. This figure means
that the printer can print up to 10,000 pages per month without
excessive wear and tear. In other words, we can safely print up
to 400 pages per work day, which is quite a lot for a department
or a work group. For volume print jobs, we naturally need to find
a printer with a higher duty cycle, and most likely it will not
be a multifunction printer.

With the introduction of new and more capable photo printers
from leading printer makers, such as HP, Epson, Canon and
Lexmark, printing our own photos is also getting easier every
day, although the cost per print may not necessarily be that much
cheaper yet. All HP printers with the capability to produce
quality photo prints are named Photosmart printers, because they
use HP's own Photosmart technology.

HP's new high-end photo printer is HP Photosmart 7550, which,
like the Epson Stylus Photo 2100, uses seven different ink colors
instead of the six that we generally find in the previous
generation of photo printers. Interesting and useful features of
the HP Photosmart 7550 include the slots for different types of
memory cards, such as the Memory Stick, SmartMedia, Secure
Digital and CompactFlash cards. With these multiple readers, we
can download photo files directly from the memory cards into the
printer and get them printed without the help of a PC. A 1.8-inch
LCD monitor enables us to preview the photos, do some editing by
pressing buttons on the panel and even send the photo files
through e-mails. The printer can also serve as a card reader for
a PC. Certain models of HP digital cameras can also download
image files directly into the printer via the USB connection.

Another interesting capability is the optimized 4800 x 1200
DPI print resolution. If the captured photo has a high resolution
of 1200 x 1200 DPI, then the printer has the intelligence to
print it with the maximum 4800 DPI, which will result in a very
fine photo print. Of course, the ink and paper used for this
purpose needs to be of a special type. The ink is also fade-
resistant, which ensures that the photos will remain true to
their original colors for quite some time.

Those who are not into realistic photo printing, but want to
print decent quality photos from time to time will save money by
choosing the regular DeskJet printers. Incidentally, I used to
think that a DeskJet printer with a model number above 1000 would
be a high-end one, but now it seems that HP names its printers
all in the thousands. For example, the new high-end DeskJet
printer is the HP DeskJet 6122.

Designed for business use in mind, the HP DeskJet 6122
emphasizes speed and duty cycle. It can print up to 20 pages per
minute (ppm) in black, or 13 ppm in color, in the draft mode, and
it has a 5,000 page-per-month duty cycle. The more affordable HP
DeskJet 5550, 3820, 3420 and 3325 have less speed and lower duty
cycles. The lower-ends use the regular four "cmyk" ink colors:
cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

So far HP has not updated its portable printer for the
notebook. I think this is the next area that the company needs to
focus their technological prowess on.
* New scanners

Like CD-Writers, scanners are everywhere. Their prices have
come down significantly, while their capabilities and speed have
increased substantially. The most versatile new scanner from HP
is the HP ScanJet 5500c. It is capable of scanning at a 2400 DPI
resolution, which is quite common for a high-end scanner. More
interesting is perhaps the color depth, which has grown to 48-
bit. This means that it can distinguish between as many as two
and 48 different colors.

The HP ScanJet 5500c is a fast scanner. With its 35-page
maximum ADF, it can scan up to eight pages per minute. Slower
scanners will make us wait for some time before we can preview
the scanned image on the computer screen. This scanner only makes
us wait seven seconds.

Less versatile scanners for the home and small office are the
HP ScanJet 4500c, 3500c and 2300c. ScanJet 4500c uses USB 2.0,
which will transfer data much faster to the host PC. The hinges
of its cover have been moved to the longer side, so it saves more
space. They should have designed all the scanners like this a
long time ago.

HP is undoubtedly working hard to facilitate operations after
the merger, and that is perhaps why we have not really seen a
breakthrough as profoundly consequential as sliced bread from
them yet. However, the incremental improvements in their current
products unquestionably prove that this company will remain a
strong player in the information and imaging technology industry.