I had the opportunity this week to attend the annual Lyra Imaging Symposium in Palm Springs. This event brings together many of the key vendors and technology providers in the printing and imaging business to discuss industry trends and developments. With representatives from Xerox, Lexmark, Epson, HP, Adobe, and others, together in the same location, it makes for some interesting presentations and even more interesting informal discussions.
The focus of this years conference was Technologies Disrupting the Business Model. Bill McGlynn (Memjet), Bruce Dahlgren (HP), and Jim Rise (Xerox) as well as representatives from Lyra all presented on topics relevant to laser printing. While all of the presenters approached the challenges in office printing differently, the following common themes emerged.
Theme 1: Color printers and color MFPs are the growth opportunity of the future for the laser printer business.
New, affordable color products like the HP Color LaserJet 1600, 2605, and 3505 as well as new low end color products from other vendors have been delivered to market with technologies that make color printing much more affordable. HP believes that providing affordable, reliable laser based products with superior print quality and deliver on the heritage of the original LaserJet is what customers want. Xerox, with their solid ink technology, believes that delivering products with a relatively high acquisition price ($2500 for the 8860 vs $1000 for the predecessor) and low color cost per page is the right approach (see Xerox blog post). Xerox also touted the greenness of solid inks cartridge free approach, but did not mention that solid ink consumes more than 3X the power due to the fact that they recommend you do not turn it off and there is no real sleep mode. Interesting to note is that Xerox also has several laser based color products that use the same cartridge based approach as HP.
Memjet, a printing technology provider, also gave a quick update on their progress of bringing a new low cost ink based technology to market. While Memjet claims that they can deliver a print technology for very high speed personal color printers at breakthrough prices, they have yet to announce any printer vendor partners for this technology.
Theme 2: Its not about speeds and feeds anymore.
Bruce Dahlgren (HP) gave a very compelling presentation on Print 2.0 and the enterprise and how printers and the documents they print have evolved over the years. He described how printing devices that nobody thought were strategic are now becoming an integral component of enterprise information delivery systems. See Jim Lyons' post on this topic.
Theme 3: Environmental.
Charley LeCompte (Lyra) and Michael Hoffmann (HP) both gave very interesting presentations on the environmental impact of printing. Michael covered HPs approach to reducing the environmental impact of printing on the environment and used the event to publicly announce HPs "closed loop" process of using 100% recycled plastics in the manufacture of HP inkjet cartridges. The process, which went into pilot in 2005, has already resulted in the manufacturing of 200 million HP printer cartridges from recycled materials. The program also lets customers world wide return inkjet cartridges for free using a postage-paid return envelope provided by HP with the inkjet print cartridge box. LaseJet printer cartridges have a similar return program and to date 106 million cartridges have been returned and recycled as part of our Planet Partners program. See Vinces previous Green post.
Charley LeCompte wrapped up the conference with an eye opening presentation on the environmental impact of printing. It is fairly intuitive that with a printer, paper usage, which equates to trees consumed, is the biggest impact on the environment. What I didnt realize is just how environmentally unfriendly the paper manufacturing process is. I learned that 13.5 million tons of paper was used by printers, MFPs and copiers in 2007 and that it takes roughly 5.3 90-foot 12-inch diameter Doug Fir pine trees to make a ton of new office paper. Thats a lot of trees! This is why duplexing is such an important thing for each and every printer user. Our studies show that duplexing saves on average 25% on paper usage. Why only 25%? Well, many documents are only 1 page long. Even so 25% savings would save a lot of trees and help minimize the impact of printing on the environment. Jim Lyons had additional coverage of Charleys presentation.
It has been a very interesting couple of days and it is encouraging to see that many of the issues in the industry are areas where we at HP are putting focus and investment to make the printing experience the best it can be for our customers.
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[Source: The HP LaserJet blog by Vince Ferraro - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]
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