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.