Printers

Ink printers

Today’s markets–corporate and home–are the domain of inkjets and lasers. But the big revolution in inkjets is yet to come. The inkjet market has the potential of growing to several times its present size, when home printing becomes really big. What actually created this market is not the inkjet in itself, but the color-capable inkjet. It’s when the inkjet offered affordable and quality color that the home market and even the high-end corporate market (read presentations market) opened up for it.

Lasers

In lasers, the market leader in India by far is HP. The first desktop laser printer came from HP’s stables and was introduced at Comdex in May 1984. This 8-ppm, 300-dpi printer came with a 8 MHz processor and a price tag of $3,495. Interestingly, the printer was not completely a “made by HP” product. The core of the printer–the print engine–was developed by Cannon.

Compare this with today’s printers and you can see how far printing technology has come. The LaserJet 5000 comes with 2 MB RAM, does 1,200 dpi at 16
ppm, and is listed at $1,425. The processor inside does 100 MHz.

In this period, the laser also acquired the ability to print color. Color lasers are yet to become mass market, and are presently limited to the high end of the corporate market. 

The first inkjet from HP–the ThinkJet (1984)