New Printers, scanner and notebook from HP

By Zatni Arbi

HONG KONG (JP): What's been cooking at HP? In such a cutthroat, competitive arena like the computer industry, no one should ever stop cooking up new products. It's either bring out or lose out. Big as it is, HP realizes this fact very well. Therefore, the company, one of whose founding fathers passed away on March 27, never stops bringing out new products for end users.

It was in October last year that I wrote a fairly comprehensive roundup of HP products launched around that time but, during the recent press off-site meeting in Hong Kong, the company has already introduced several new products. I'll share with you some of the most interesting of them, particularly the ones that I believe will set a new trends in the industry.

Pentium notebook

HP entered the notebook market with its OmniBook series. Although magazine editors raved about these OmniBooks, notebook buyers still went for the more popular brands, such as Toshiba, Compaq and IBM.

The new OmniBook 5500 may change this. At the press off-site meeting, I got the chance to have a close look at a demonstration model of the new 133 MHz notebook, which, according to HP, is still not a complete product.

You can see it in the bottom right corner of the accompanying picture. The screen is a large, active-matrix LCD with a 12.1" diagonal. Honestly speaking, except for the size, the screen was not very impressive. Some colleagues who saw it even thought it was a dual scan screen. I hope that for the shipping products that carry a suggested price of US$8,320, HP would put in a slightly better screen, something that matches the brilliance of IBM ThinkPad 760 CD.

For the budget-conscious, HP has a lower priced 100 MHz version that has a dual-scan LCD instead of active-matrix. At $4,820.00, however, I think it will have to compete with a lot of other brands in the notebook market.

The swappable disk drive was very interesting and handy and it might just well be a model for future notebook disk drive. If you don't need a CD-ROM drive, you can insert a 3.5" floppy drive into its slot, which is located at center front. Then you'll have a built-in floppy disk drive.

If you want a CD-ROM drive, you can take out the floppy drive, and connect a cable on its back to the parallel port of the notebook. Naturally, the unit has a parallel pass-through port. That's really neat, because now we can have both the CD-ROM and floppy disk drive at the same time.

Following the general trend in notebooks, the trackball from older versions of OmniBooks has been replaced by a TrackPoint II pointing device. The machine's 133 MHz Pentium didn't produce too much heat. I can recall the time when I first played with a 486DX2-66 based Twinhead; the chip was almost burning my fingers. Intel has gone a long way in designing low-power CPU chips.

Other features include sound capability, an optional enhanced lithium ion battery pack, and a true instant on feature that lets you get to work immediately. If you don't mind the steep price, the 133 MHz notebook might be a dream notebook for professionals on the go.

The color printer market is definitely picking up pace. Just recently, Lexmark introduced its first color laser printer. Not surprisingly, HP has had to update its first generation of color laser printer. The new versions are called Color LaserJet 5 and Color LaserJet 5M. The M indicates that the printer is Postscript-ready.

New

The new color laserjet prints up to 10 pages per minute in black and white or single color, or two to three pages per minute in full color. Their duty cycle, which means the number of pages they are expected to churn out each month, has been raised to 30,000 pages. That's 1,000 pages a day. That sounds almost like a heavy duty printer, doesn't it? But with 10 pages per minute at maximum speed, how many can you print in a month? Go figure!

The printers' standard memory capacity has been increased to 20 MB for Color LaserJet 5 and 36 for 5M. HP doesn't believe in the importance of resolution in terms of DPI, and they claim that their Resolution Enhancement Technology yields better results than mere higher resolution.

Incidentally, I read an announcement in the Hong Kong Standard that HP was phasing out the use of Postscript language in its line of printers. When I asked HP about the reason behind this decision, I couldn't get very specific information except that, at present, they were still working closely with Adobe.

The article in the Hong Kong Standard expected that Adobe would be in trouble by this development. On the contrary, my personal opinion is that HP will be hurt more if it abandons Postscript. The reason is the fact that Postscript is the printer language of choice in the majority of service bureaus, and these are the people who have the money and the need to buy high-end and expensive equipment.

Worry

Actually, Adobe doesn't have to worry. If HP goes ahead with its decision to use an alternative of Postscript in its printers, many other printer makers will jump in to grab the opportunity by providing alternatives.

Well, for everybody's best interests, let's hope that HP and Adobe can work out their differences and rekindle the glow that once shone on their close relationship.

In the past, the suffix p in a HP scanner model name indicated a black and white only scanner. This has changed in the new HP ScanJet 4p, as this one also scans in color.

It has 24-bit color and 8-bit gray-scale scanning capability. The scanning resolution is 1200 DPI enhanced, or 300 DPI optical. While it is way below the resolution capabilities of a ScanJet 4c, which is 2400 DPI enhanced and 600 DPI optical, ScanJet 4p is more than sufficient for general office use.

I really think the decision to add color capability in a general office scanner is a commendable one, given the level of proliferation of color printers in offices today. Just recently, I bought an HP DeskJet 850C for a relative, and I was surprised to find out that a lot of people were also buying this type of printer.

What this means is that color is really catching up with black and white. Suggested price is $633.00, but I believe the street price will be close to the price of Logitech's PageScan Color. Watch out, Logitech.

Win Color DeskJet

Above, I just mentioned DeskJet 850C. This popular color printer now has a twin, DeskJet 820Cxi. Besides having a lower price tag, the new printer, which is otherwise identical to DeskJet 850C, is optimized for the Windows environment.

The speed of this printer is acceptable: Up to six pages per minute for black and white, and up to four pages for color. Of course, the higher the quality of output that you want, the longer it takes to print.

If you work in an exclusively Windows environment, you should get this printer instead of the slightly higher priced 850C. If you work in multiple environments, your best choice is the latter.

HP has also introduced a slew of other new products, including networking products and storage products, as well as HP Vectra servers. As I said before, what I like most about this company is its ability to bring out new products with more features but lower prices. If only we had more and more computer industry leaders that did the same for us.