Epson moving fast into business-class ink jets

Up until now, Epson ink jet printers and all-in-ones were, like most of their competitors, of limited use to businesses. Once you looked past the rated draft speed to a “normal” resolution (around 600dpi) speed, the speed fell off disappointingly, often to under 5ppm. In addition, color ink has been expensive, often far more than laser toner. These printers, well suited to occasional printing and well equipped for printing digital photos, just weren’t suitable for a real business.

But Epson is rapidly changing that perception. It has come out with two new series of ink jet printers and MFPs that offer from good to excellent speed, more moderate printing costs, and (in some cases) more than minimal hardware features.

The WorkForce series contains two printers, the Workforce 30 ($70) and 40 ($130). These low-cost machines offer decent speeds averaging well over 10ppm at normal resolution. The WorkForce 40 also includes both Ethernet and Wi-Fi networking. Both machines have good photo printing features as well.

Two all-in-one multifunctionals are also included in the WorkForce series. The WorkForce 500 ($180) and 600 ($200) can print, copy, scan, and fax, and have a 30-sheet document feeder in addition to a platen. The printing speeds are over 20ppm in normal resolution.

Even more robust are the printers in the B series, made up of the single-user t B-300 ($329) and the network-ready B-500Dn ($529). These machines print at over 30ppm in normal mode. They have fairly solid paper handling for ink jet printers with 650 sheets of input. They also do not come with extensive photo printing tools bundled in, indicating where Epson is headed with this series.

But most exciting is the cost per page. Epson is claiming a cost per-blsck page cost for the 500DN of under one cent, and a color cost around 3.5 cents. The B-300 costs are a bit higher, but still remarkable for a low-cost printer.

We have yet to get our hands on any of these machines, so we’ll be a little skeptical for now. And speed figures on ink jet printers are notoriously variable, based on ink coverage for each page, unlike laser printers, which have much more predictable speeds. But if the speeds and costs are anything near on the mark, Epson is going to make a big inroad into the growing market for low-cost color laser printers. Like HP and Ricoh (and others to follow), Epson is on the way to making ink jet technology a real contended in the office.

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.

Kodak on the mend?

Eastman Kodak declared today that its net income showed a major upswing in the most recent quarter, thanks to increased digital sales. Kodak has long been on the decline, thanks to the rapid implosion of the analog photography business. Since 2004, it has shed over 27,000 jobs. But signs are good that the radical corporate restructuring is over and the digital strategies (including ink jet printers and color production printers) is starting to pay off.

Indeed, digital sales at Kodak surged 15%, even as analog sales mostly film) dropped 15%. According to a Wall Street Journal article, the company hopes to sell half a million ink jet printers in 2008. Other strong areas are in digital cameras sales and digital photo printing kiosks.

This is good news for Kodak, where digital now accounts for over three-quarters of revenue. But margins are still thin and the competition on all fronts (ink jets, cameras, high-end printing) is getting tougher all the time, as companies like HP, Canon, Sony, and Xerox are all on the move.

Xerox opens solid ink factory

Xerox sales of its solid ink office printers is doing so well that they’ve opened a new $24 million plant to make the crayon-like solid ink sticks. The new Oregon-based facility, according to Xerox, increases the company’s solid ink manufacturing capacity tenfold.

This seems to be a sign that Xerox’s campaign to push its color printers, especially its Phaser 8860 line, is doing well. The 8860 offers remarkably low costs per page for both color and black-and-white. Xerox also promotes the fact that the solid ink produces far less waste than toner-solutions, and that its lower heat requirements cut power use.

We’ve long thought that Xerox would extend the solid ink technology, one of the company’s biggest advantages, both up and down the product line, perhaps even into the copier market. The new plant may be an indication that’s what is in the cards, and the modern, high-capacity factory may allow Xerox to get decent margins, even with the lower cost per page.

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.