HP's new enterprise multifunction printers are not for sale

Stephen Withers
Monday, 16 April 2007 20:31

IT Industry - Market

Hewlett-Packard has announced a new family of multifunction printers using some smart technology, but you can't buy one.

The CM8050 and CM8060 MFPs use the company's Edgeline printheads to cover the width of an A4 page without moving.

There's more intellectual property in Edgeline than 99 percent of technology companies have in their entire IP portfolio, said Gary Cutler,  vice president and general manager of Edgeline technologies, imaging and printing group, Hewlett-Packard Asia/Pacific and Japan.

Copying continues to drop relative to printing - perhaps due in part to the HP-championed shift from 'print and distribute' to 'distribute and print' over the last decade. Edgeline provides "the lowest cost colour printing with no trade-off in quality," said Cutler.

"It's not just a technology, it's also an architecture" that HP will use for 10 to 15 years, said Cutler.

The combination of fixed printheads and the revolving drum (which he called "an outstanding piece of technology") gives speed, accuracy, quality and simplicity.

The CM8000 series "will set the standard for performance, reliability and cost," said Cutler.

Other companies have expressed interest in the technology, and while manufacturing a similar printhead would be relatively easy (HP uses techniques from semiconductor manufacturing), replicating the drum would be a bigger challenge for a competitor.

What about reliability?