NEW YORK, NY - While "one-hour photo printing" sounds pretty efficient, it may now be 54 minutes too slow.
That's because the new photo printing technology unveiled here by Hewlett-Packard lets you print a photo in 14 seconds or an entire roll in six minutes; far faster than the one-hour deals offered by the big box retailers like London Drugs or Wal-Mart.
Better yet, the new scalable printing technology is less costly; allowing the home photo printing fan to crank out 4 x 6 prints for (all figures US) $.024 or about a nickel less than the two-year old, industry benchmark of $.29.
At an industry event held here at Manhattans trendy Hudson Studios, HP executive vice president, Imaging and Printing Group, Vyomesh Joshi, announced several new printers and related products. More importantly he outlined how the company had spent $1.4 billion over the past five years to develop a new printing technology that focuses on the architecture and manufacturing of the inkjet printhead. The assembly of the new printhead enables a faster development cycle at an estimated 50 percent lower cost.
HP says the printhead components are fabricated as one unit via a photolithographic process, rather than welded together in post-production. This results in the precise alignment of the chamber, nozzles and heating element, which then improves the accuracy of ink drop placement. This design also supports an increased density of nozzles, with 3,900 nozzles or more on a single printhead. More nozzles and increased dot placement accuracy translates into faster, high-quality prints.
In other words, the new scheme incorporates the print head in the printer rather than the ink cartridge. New cartridges will cost around $10; down from the $30 area we see now.
The new printing system also warns the user if there is not enough ink to complete the print job before you begin; meaning you will not run out of ink mid-page. Overall, the new lines are designed to make printing at home easier, especially for women who may not be quite as savvy around a PC as their husband.
"Printing at home is way too hard," says Tuan Tran, VP Marketing at HPs' Consumer Imaging and Printer group.
Because the new platform is scalable, HP will use it on all printers; from high-volume consumer users and small to medium-size businesses and up to the commercial market. This is made possible in three technical ways:
First, HP can increase the size of the swath - the area the printhead covers with each pass over a page. With larger swathes, the printhead needs to make fewer passes over a page, thus leading to increased speeds. Second, HP can increase the number of nozzles on the printhead to allow for higher quality, larger prints. And third, HP can increase the number of inks per printhead, providing richer colors.
Two of the new printers introduced were the HP Photosmart 8250 Photo Printer ($199) and the HP Photosmart 3000 All-in-One series, ($299 to $399). These models, which use six individual HP Vivera ink cartridges, are aimed at home users who want to print batches of photos, unattended.
For the office, HP announced its Officejet Pro K550 Color Printer series. It gives laser-like quality text and water-resistant prints at up to twice the print speed and half the purchase cost of competitive color lasers printers, according to the HP press release. The new ink formulations work with HP Advanced Papers; two new porous papers designed to deliver instantly dry, water-resistant photos for the home and smear-resistant pages for the office through HP's patented color lock technology.
A new "Auto Sense" technology comes with barcodes on the paper allowing the printer to identify the size, orientation and type of photo paper. If it doesn't "see" the bar code, it doesn't print. The Supplies area within HP generated $13 billion last fiscal year, a healthy chunk of HPs overall revenues of $83.3 billion.
HP also introduced six new portable photo printers, including the "toaster-size" Photosmart 475 GoGo ($279). It is the first compact photo printer capable of printing 5 x 7-inch photos, in addition to 4 x 6-inch and panorama prints and can store more than 1,000 images. Another model, the HP Photosmart 420 series GoGo Photo Studio, ($299) includes a camera and a printer with a dock.
New features were announced in some of the new cameras HP also released. For example, the HP Photosmart R818 and R817 digital cameras have HP Real Life Technologies allowing users to stitch panoramic photos together inside the camera, meaning you don't need the editing tools of a PC to print a panoramic shot.
At the same media event, HP announced a major deal with Walgreens, the largest drug store chain in the US. Walgreens customers can now use the features of Snapfish, an online photo service company purchased by HP earlier this year. Although nothing was announced for Canada, watch for HP to move into this market area as it consolidates its Instant Share business with Snapfish. Customers will be able to upload photos to a store and have them printed out on high quality, in-store printers; or simply store and view the pictures on-line. They can also choose to print the photos on coffee mugs, mousepads, T-shirts, neck ties and so on.
HP plans to pitch the new printers and cameras to the critical September and Christmas buying seasons in a marketing campaign called "Brilliantly Simple."
Competition in the printer area has clearly heated up in the past year and HP is using its R&D and printing patents to leapfrog ahead of competitors like Lexmark and Epson.
Although printing is an extremely complicated business, HP simply wants to win market share by lowering costs for consumers and improving the speed and quality of printed photos.
Gregory B. Michetti of the Alberta-based systems integration firm Michetti Information Solutions, Inc. can be reached via www.michetti.com.
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