Turning it off

HP's UK branch has released a short online publication called “The HP Guide for Greener Printing” available here online.

Most of the advice is pretty obvious, with encouragement to print in duplex, send more documents electronically, and recycle paper.

On interesting point is made, however, about the effect of letting printers and copiers run when not in use. “All office equipment uses energy when switched on or in stand-by mode. In the UK alone, equipment left on standby is responsible for generating over 3 million tonnes of CO2 each year, according to the Energy Saving Trust.”

Of course, many copiers and some printers have sleep modes that are automatically triggered if left idle for a preset period (generally somewhere between five and 60 minutes) , or can be set to go off ready automatically during non-working hours. That’s part of the new EnergyStar criteria for newer machines, and many companies are complying. But many older desktop machines in particular do not offer any sleep feature. Having employees shut down desktop printers and MFPs at the end of the day may be a smart idea.

New HP color ledger MFPs

Hewlett Packard recently introduced a new color laser printer-based multifunctionals group handling ledger-size paper. The LaserJet CM6030 models print at 30ppm in both color and black-and-white, while the CM6040 models print at 40ppm in color black-and-white. Street prices for these models range from $6,999 to $8,999.

These MFPs have a maximum capacity of 2,100 sheets. They also come with a 40 page document feeder. Automatic duplex and Ethernet connectivity are standard.. On the output side, these machines offer500 sheets of standard output, but they also have several optional finishers, a multiposition stapler unit and a five-tray finisher with saddle-stitching and booklet-making.

Scanning to email is standard, and faxing is standard on some versions, optional on others. Consumables are under one cent per page in black, under eight cents in color.

These new MFPs from HP look and act a lot like copier MFPs. The prices are lower than comparable-speed color copiers, but some of the options (including paper feed capacity) are not at the same level. Nevertheless, the CM6030 and CM6040 models a good solution for someone who needs the functionality of a fast color laser MFP, but does not need all the added bells and whistles.

HP makes (somewhat) greener ink jet cartridges

HP announced that it would use recycled plastics to make its ink jet cartridges. Using a new technology called “closed loop plastic recycling,” the company will use plastics from sources of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastics, such as old ink cartridges and water bottles. The process, which involves shredding, is reported to use over 70% recycled materials in making the new cartridges.

HP already has a worldwide effort to take back used ink cartridges for its customers. The new process closes the circle, according to HP sources. It also says that over 200 million cartridges have been manufactured already using this process. The company is working on doing the same thing with laser cartridges.

This is a welcome step, a chance to reduce toxic industrial waste sent to landfills by a little. But HP could do even better: they could come up with an authorized way of refilling cartridges so they don’t have to be constantly remanufactured. They could also supply much larger ink reservoirs so that the cartridges don’t need to be constantly replaced.

These steps are unlikely; HP and other ink jet manufacturers have no desire to kill the cash cow that allows companies to charge $6,000 a gallon or more for ink, doled out a thimbleful at a time. The recycling is a laudable baby step in terms of green technology, but HP could do more.

Embedded Equitrac

It’s no longer just the copier companies that are embedding 3rd party software solutions on their control panels. Hewlett-Packard and Equitrac announced that Equitrac’s job tracking and cost management software has now been embedded on a wide variety of HP’s high-en multifunctionals, from the 24ppm Color LaserJet 9500mfp to the 50ppm LaserJet 9050mfp.

The Equitrac software is integrated into the HP control panel, so that users can, for example, enter in a security code before sending or retrieving a job. It comes in two forms, an Express version and a high-end Office version (aimed at larger businesses). The software allows for user authentication and access control, job tracking, cost assignment, reporting, and enforcement of corporate print policies.

Of course, there are Equitrac versions integrated into most of the major copier lines now. What is interesting is how HP’s top MFPs are offering the same kind of enterprise solutions that were once a major differentiator between the copier-based multifunctionals and the printer-based ones. The line between copiers and printers gets narrower all the time.

HP expanding its wide-format lineup

Hewlett-Packard announced the purchase of Israel-based wide-format printing company NUR Macroprinters in a $117 million deal. This follows the recent purchase of MacDermid ColorSpan, another maker of wide format printers, used especially in signage, backdrops, and billboards.

NUR makes continuous-feed color ink jet machines that can output images up to 17 feet wide, based on digital input. It can print on such media as canvas and vinyl, in addition to paper.

HP already had a strong position in the wide format area, and the two purchases only expanded that. HP has an announced intention of moving upward in the printing market from its strong base in home and office machines toward professional printing.

Print 2.0 — Part Two

Hewlett-Packard’s Print 2.0 initiative, once you get past the marketing hype, is about a series of packages that extend the usefulness of printing for different classes of users. We’ll give a few examples below of new applications where we think HP has made a step forward, and may well help in its goal to have people print even more pages on desktop printers.

Consumers and Small Businesses
One trend that HP has discovered is that while a few years ago, the large majority of pages were printed from standard PC applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, etc.), now a growing number of pages come directly from an Internet page (48 percent according to their figures and growing). Web pages have several characteristics for the print market, not least being that (if printed in color) they use up a lot of ink or toner, thanks to colored backgrounds. But as we all know, Web pages often don’t fit on printed pages.

So HP has come up with a program called Smart Web Printing that allows you to combine selections from several Web pages on one printed page. It will automatically resize the content to fit on one or more pages. You can also edit text and delete or resize graphics. This software will be packaged with new HP printers due out in September.

Small and Medium Business
One of the new applications that HP recently purchase is one called Logoworks, a package that allows businesses to put together a whole suit of branding materials (stationery, business cards, etc.), without having to go outside to purchase design services or commercial printing services. The software includes a number of templates that users can simply plug in logo and text.

Enterprise
The big announcement its new Open Extensibility Platform, which provides an application programming interface (API) so that users and third parties can develop interfaces and workflows for high-end printers and especially multifunctionals. With this HP joins copier companies like Canon, Ricoh, and Xerox, which offer this capability for their copier/multifunctionals. It is clear that HP is aiming at that market as one of its key strategies, with both high-speed ink jet and laser multifunctionals that increasingly look like office copiers.

Printer Management
HP’s Web Jetadmin has been the standard for IT department management of printers on the network, and has been a major selling point for HP. HP has upgraded its Office Server software, which adds several impressive layers of administrative controls. It has an impressive list of features, including on-the-fly format conversion, group and individual privilege management, job authentication, accounting, and performance reporting. While this product and the suite of products that extend it has been on the market for a while, HP released a number of enhancements.

There were lots more new announcements (including hardware upgrades and new software alliances. If Print 2.0 is not as quite a big revolution as HP would like to have us believe, it is still an impressive campaign on every front. The HP juggernaut has shifted up a gear and its rivals in the printer market will have to catch up.

Print 2.0 — Part One

Hewlett-Packard recently rolled out its $300 million Print 2.0 marketing campaign. The term Print 2.0 is based on the growing concept of Web 2.0, generally seen as the second generation of Web use and services.

Basic idea behind Web 2.0 is an increased emphasis on user-to-user communication. Examples of Web 2.0 include YouTube (self-produced film clips), podcasting (shared audio information), FaceBook (social networking), and Wikipedia (an encyclopedia based on shared expertise). Some see the term as marketing hype, but there is no doubt that these programs and others have made it easier for end users to move from becoming simple consumers of the Web to producers and consumers.

So what is Print 2.0? It’s a little confusing at this point. HP sees it as an attempt to move “from selling printers to selling printing.” What that means is something like a move from selling boxes to selling solutions. And it makes sense. HP makes little if any profit on the sales of printing devices, especially in the competitive home and small-office markets. Where it does make money, and lots of it, is in selling consumables: toner and ink, which are high markup items. Hence HP’s emphasis not on selling more printers (they dominate the market for both lasers and ink jets), but on have customers print more pages on those printers (and buying more supplies).

HP, then, is in the midst of figuring out how to entrench and extend its domination. It’s pushing strongly in three areas:
* On the home consumer level, it is providing new software that encourages end users to get creative without necessarily having to buy or master Illustrator or Photoshop
* On the office level, it is putting a strong emphasis on multifunctionals as replacements for office copiers and on the workflow tools related to them
* On the high-end production level, it has been pushing it new Edgeline high-speed ink jet printer-multifunctionals along with a new generation wide-format printers and HP’s jaw-dropping Halo video-conferencing.

We’ll look at some of the specific new products in another post.

Color laser printers – down, down, up!

We’ve been looking back at issues of the Better Buys for Business Color Laser Guide, and are struck by the amazingly rapid changes in the market.

First, we looked at some typical models from major vendors in 2002. All of these models are letter/legal-size printers and come network-ready. Note that tandem color printers, those that ran at or near the same speed in color and black-and-white, were just coming on the market. These printers are all suitable for small workgroup use and they are pretty representative. At this point, there were very few printers that could print faster than 20ppm in color.

Vendor	Product	Speed	Street price	Est. cost per page
Brother	HL-2400CeN	16ppm black/ 4ppm color	$1,999	2.7 cents (black)/ 10.6 cents (color)
Hewlett-Packard	Color LaserJet 4550 N	16ppm black/ 4ppm color	$2,369	2.2 cents (black)/ 12.7 cents (color)
Lexmark	C750n	20ppm black/ 20ppm color	$3,399	1.4 cents (black)/ 8.9 cents (color)
OKI	C72000n	20ppm black/ 12ppm color	$2,279	1.9 cents (black)/ 9.5 cents (color)
Xerox	Phaser 750N	16ppm black/ 4ppm color	$1,999	1.9 cents (black)/ 9.5 cents (color)

Now we’ll look at some parallel models from our upcoming 2007 guide. Note that there are many more models available, and lots of very speedy tandem models, running at 40ppm and faster in color. These models are again small workgroup-oriented, network-ready printers.

Vendor	Product	Speed	Street price	Est. cost per page
Brother	HL-2700CN	31ppm black/ 8ppm color	$450	3.3 cents (black)/ 13.4 cents (color)
Hewlett-Packard	Color LaserJet 3600n	17ppm black/ 17ppm color	$1,199	2.2 cents (black)/ 12.0 cents (color)
Lexmark	C532n	24ppm black/ 22ppm color	$499	1.4 cents (black)/ 9.8 cents (color)
OKI	C6000n	24ppm black/ 20ppm color	$700	2.6 cents (black)/ 16.3 cents (color)
Xerox	Phaser 6180/N	26ppm black/ 20ppm color	$500	2.4 cents (black)/ 12.2 cents (color)

Two things are noticeable. First, and most obviously, the staggering drop in unit prices along with a major increase in color printing speed. Second, there’s an overall rise in cost per page for these lower-priced units. Note that the most moderate prices belong to the HP models, which has a far higher price tag than the others.

Conclusion: The decline in prices has been countered by a general increase in costs. And as, color printers get faster and users print even more pages in color, the lower unit prices are an enticement for users to buy more and more machines and eventually high-cost toner.