HP's new enterprise multifunction printers are not for sale

Stephen Withers
Monday, 16 April 2007 21:31

IT Industry - Market

A 10in VGA screen on the control panel uses full-motion video to show users how to perform tasks such as clearing paper jams, and a series of LEDs direct their attention to the appropriate areas of the device.

The user interface is covered by multiple patents - "it's extremely valuable," said Cutler.

Cost is a key feature of the new models. For general office printing, reduces colour saturation for cheaper printing, while keeping black at full strength for clarity of text. The result is good enough for 80 percent of requirements, and cheaper than 'professional quality' for materials that are going outside the organisation.

Furthermore, jobs with a small amount of colour, such as a Word document containing blue hyperlinks or an invoice with a colour logo, are priced as if they were monochrome.

The CM8050/8060 is "the universal printer/copier... no compromises, no sacrifices," said Cutler. It has "the lowest total cost of operation that this industry has ever seen."

Greater print speed is on the cards. "Edgeline really wants to scale up," he said, saying that 140ppm could be achieved with relatively little work. Interestingly, Cutler claimed that even better reliability could be achieved as print speeds increased.

HP officials were very cagey when asked about cost. The CM8050 and CM8060 - the only difference is the average print speed (40ppm colour/50ppm mono vs 50ppm/60ppm) - are only offered on a managed print services basis in the Asia Pacific region, and there is therefore no outright purchase price. Lim claimed colour printing was 30 percent cheaper than the industry average, but then declined to put a figure on that average cost was.

Cutler pointed out that managed print services means that it would be HP, not the customer, that selected the most appropriate hardware for a particular pattern of printing. An "average" customer for the CM8060 would produce around 20,000 pages per month (60 percent mono and 40 percent colour), have around 50 people using it, and would be seeking a 30-36 month contract.

Stephen Withers travelled to Beijing as the guest of HP.