Printing solutions

MFDs are in. Last year, we had said that this market is being increasingly targeted by printer vendors and we have seen some fairly aggressive strategies since then. The prices have dropped and print-speeds have shot up. Take a look the exclusive MFD shootout in this issue for details -the average price is around Rs. 35,000 with a 20-25 pages per minute speed. The best part is, these are Laser MFDs not inkjets. 

Another trend in the market is the way these printers had evolved in the past and the way all that changed in the past year. Printers are suddenly no longer something you pushed into a dusty office corner and left out of office-tours. Office spaces have become more visible and open-spaced in recent times and printer models have changed to accommodate that style-they have become externally colorful and elegantly designed. But, all this does not come at the cost of performance or modularity. These printers have retained their versatility and modularity. Even MFDs have started shrinking from floor-top behemoths to sleek and desktop devices. Aggressive marketing has ensured that IT purchasers are being made aware of the better value an MFD offers them over just another printer.

Buying a printer or a multi-functional device no longer remains as simply going to the market and picking out a favorite model. Management of these things and what they do is increasingly a concern to businesses and one way to beat this problem is to outsource it. Print management solution providers have sprung up everywhere. These pundits of the print world look after not only your devices, but also consumables. They help you corner wastage and manage overheads. So this is a new factor in your cost calculations for printing.

What's more, the printer vendors themselves are pushing concepts like document management, aggressively. See our separate story on that topic for more information. Vendors like Canon and Xerox for example see their devices performing as complete communication hubs in your office. They say, right from printing to faxing to copying and scanning, the bulk of inter-office and intra office communications have something to do with their hardware. Features like mailboxes and passwords and remotely accessible web-pages are coming up on printing machines. We are also slowly starting to see embedded software-web servers to serve those pages -being associated with printers.

Information is being stored on the printer itself, in the long-term. Workgroup and enterprise class printers and MFDs have hard disks both for faster spooling and for mailbox storage. With this, in comes the entire gamut of discussions on security and privacy. Is this hard disk encrypted? How difficult is it for someone else to view your print jobs? Can John access Peter's mailbox? Worse still, would your printer's hard disk and files in it get virus infected and if so, what are the implications of that?

MFDs are shrinking and to fit your higher-echelon executive's desktop. Breadbox sized devices from vendors like HP and Canon and Epson are scaling all components of printing, scanning and faxing onto a device not bigger than a microwave oven. The thing is, the quality remains more or less the same as a good workhorse equivalent.

What about the dot-matrix? The DMP is still not dead. Besides finding a boost to its life-span by morphing into point-of-sale printers strewn around our malls and movie theatres and chain food stores, the DMP is still alive and selling in reasonable numbers. Dot matrix has donned another and much larger avatar and penetrated the large volume printing market-bills, financial records and the like.

Inkjet printers are now facing a dismal fate, it seems. One, no one seems to want to buy them anymore. The biggest factor in play today against the inkjet is the cost- lasers today cost almost as much as an inkjet for a much better quality and output speed. Inkjet vendors are therefore bundling more features rather than innovation in technology. Has the technology associative with an inkjet reached its saturation point?

Mobile printing-where has this gone? While nothing from the realms of science fiction has fructified, we are seeing a few interesting trends. Mobile printers are obviously for people on the move and recently the list of types of devices you need to print from has expanded to include phones, smartphones and PDAs. These devices have technologies like Bluetooth and can use memory cards and sticks-the printers simply add support for these means to add printing capability to those mobile devices. So, now you can click a photo with your mobile phone and fire a print directly without needing to connect to a PC or a laptop.

A novel way that vendors have found to increase quality of prints offered by mobile printers and maintain their compact size is by using a film instead of a cartridge. There are four transparent films inside the printer-one for each of cyan, magenta, yellow and black-each of which forms an image for that color on the paper. The printer needs upto four passes for printing a single sheet. These printers are used by in-the-field photographers and mobile users. Professional photographers use them for proofing.

Current day technologies are no longer plagued by issues that limited quality and speed of printing, especially in the colored arena. Colored lasers were prohibitively costly, and now they have come down to 'attractive' levels to warrant a consideration. Even entry-level printers are able to produce acceptable to good quality prints on normal paper media. Therefore, unless your purchase is aimed at a very high end reason that necessitates a good quality printer, this can be given very low priority on your feature/performance charts.

Internet printing probably didn't pickup as much as was being hyped. But a few notable vendor-sponsored projects, especially post-Tsunami on the south-western coastline has seen this go up slightly. They're calling it 'outsourced printing'. Basically, the idea remains the same-someone sets up a printer for public or protected access on the Internet and you send your print jobs to it. The operator charges a fee based on copies and either delivers them to you or waits for a pickup.