New printers, scanner for small businesses

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Hewlett-Packard believes that there is a potential market for home PCs in Indonesia. This may sound more like wishful thinking, and come to think of it, who cares what the difference between a home PC and a business PC is anyway, especially when talking about the PC market in Indonesia?

Take Tommy, my nephew, for instance. He works in a government office that deals with zoning and urban planning. The latest PC his office purchased was a Compaq Presario, a home PC. He now uses this machine to run AutoCAD and scan maps.

Why on earth did they buy a Presario for that kind of work? The only reason that I could think of was that the boss wanted to take the computer home at the weekend and, under the guise of finishing work, spend the weekend watching rented Video CDs on the office computer.

We in Indonesia don't segment computers according to the categories designated by Intel and computer manufacturers. That is why machines like Presarios and Aptivas turn up in the workplace. Next month, we may also begin to see the Pavilion, Hewlett Packard's (HP) new Home PC, being used for commercial purposes too.

Incidentally, I am still awaiting a chance to test drive the new HP Pavilion. I'll certainly let you know what I find out about this computer, which has recently gained in popularity in the U.S. In the meantime, here are some new interesting products that HP revealed at a recent exhibition held in the Shangri-La Hotel, Jakarta.

New ScanJet

HP, which has stopped using single digits to name its products, unveiled the LaserJet 3100, LaserJet 4000 and ScanJet 5100C. If you visit their Web site, you'll also be able to learn about the ScanJet 6100C, HPs top-of-the-range scanner.

ScanJet 5100 has been designed with simplicity in mind. If you tell the scanning software what application you want to insert the scanned image into, the intelligent program will choose the best file format for that application. HP says that photo quality will be optimized when scanned, and black-and-white line art and logos can be scaled to any size you like. Text is also read accurately.

The optical scanning resolution is 300 DPI. The hardware is capable of 300 by 600 resolutions, and using the software you can optimize this to 1200 DPI. ScanJet 6100 is capable of producing 2400 DPI with the help of a software enhancer.

As technology marches on, we become more and more impatient. Speed is now of the essence in almost everything we do, including scanning. ScanJet 5100C scans with a single pass, and under normal operating conditions takes six milliseconds to scan one horizontal line. According to HP, a page with photos, text and logos can be scanned in three minutes with all the optimizing and enhancing functions working. In the faster mode, a single line can be scanned in only 2 milliseconds.

It looks like I can now start to think about retiring my seven year old ScanJet IIC.

Color Palmtop

Life is dull without color. That is why most palmtop computers running Windows CE were not much more interesting than calculators. They're screens consisted of various shades of black and white.

But now you get a color palmtop. HP 620LX runs Windows CE and can display up to 256 different colors on its 640 x 240 mm LCD screen. If you want to make a presentation, you can connect a VGA monitor to an optional VGA-out PC Card and run PowerPoint at an 800 x 600 resolution. Not bad at all for a gadget that weighs just a little bit more than half a kilogram.

I found the keyboard quite comfortable to use, given its very limited size. You can the included pointer to jot down quick notes. The memory is a generous 16 MB RAM, and you can even record your own messages to be attached later to outgoing E-mail. It comes with productivity software such as Pocket Word, Pocket Excel and Pocket PowerPoint from Microsoft. To browse the Internet, you have Pocket Internet Explorer from the same software maker.

Also introduced at the exhibition were the new HP 340LX and HP 360LX Palmtop PCs. As you may have guessed, both have black and white displays. Whether the HP 620LX will be able to match the popularity of Palm III from 3Com remains to be seen though.

Printers

HP without a new printer every six months would be as improbable a state of affairs as General Motors without a new model every year. But this time only two DeskJets were introduced: DeskJet 1120C, to replace the first generation of HP A3 inkjet printers, and DeskJet 720C.

I should say that I was really impressed with the print quality of the DeskJet 720C. It made my expensive DeskJet 1600C look pale by comparison. Even on plain paper, photos print out beautifully in brilliant colors.

DeskJet 720C is meant to complement your Home PC. It prints eight black-and-white pages per minute, or four color pages per minute. This printer also supports Intel's MMX Technology for faster color processing.

Unlike my DeskJet 1600C, the 720C also prints on a variety of media. It prints banner, and it will let you unleash your creativity by printing on a special kind of material so that you can later iron the print and transfer it onto a T-Shirt.

The DeskJet 1120C is a desktop publisher's dream come true because it can print on any size of paper, from 4" x 6" to 13" x 19". It also boasts PhotoREt II photo enhancement technology which allows photo quality images to be printed.

Incidentally, here's a trick that Pak Henry from the HP Service Department taught me when my niece's DeskJet 400 seemed to malfunction. If the DeskJet 400 ink cartridge refuses to go to the far right hand side of its path and both indicator lights start blinking, all you need to do is turn the printer off and gently turn the so-called cartridge "service-station" at the end of the cartridge path until the flat surface faces upward. It's a very simple fix, but if you don't know how to do it, you'll have to waste a lot of time taking your printer to a service center.