In-depth: Good deals to drive printing market

The hardware advantage

As printers become increasingly competitive on the price of hardware, vendors are looking at differentiating themselves through total cost of ownership, green technology and other selling angles.

Fuji Xerox is releasing its EA Ecotoner, which requires 20 percent less heat to diffuse toner onto the paper than regular toners. This reduces the power consumed by the machine during warm-up and print runs.

Its other green pitch is solid ink, which the vendor says it will spend more time promoting. Solid ink printers are refilled by slotting in another block of ink - with no surrounding toners, drums or plastic cases. The ink is made from a soy extract through environmentally friendly chemicals and processes, claims Brad Monsborough, marketing manager for Australia and New Zealand.

Oki has championed its LED technology for 20 years against laser in the colour market. Brother has just released LED printers too under licence from OKI as a more affordable alternative to laser.

"The quality output is exactly the same to the naked eye," says Brother's Webster. Brother is pricing its LED MFDs at $699 to $899 with print speeds of 16 pages per minute - double the speed of the nearest competing laser, claims Webster.

"LED allows us to make a more affordable machine for the channel with faster speeds, more compact, less moving parts, less maintenance, longer life, and running costs are very competitive," says Webster. The LEDs produce colour at 21c a page, which Webster says is roughly the same as laser.

However, Graham Harman, general manager of OKI Data Australia, claims LED technology is in fact better than laser in several areas.

"Arguably, LED technology will bring out far superior colour and mono than laser," says Harman. LED printers can print onto a far wider range of media - from posters and banners to business cards.

Oki is standing behind the reliability of its LED range with the announcement on 1 December of a lifetime warranty for all print heads.

The Japanese engineering company, which manufactures high-end telecommunications equipment as well as printers, draws on its heritage to customise hardware and firmware for larger customers. Around 10 percent of sales in Australia and globally are customised machines, Harushige Sugimoto, president and CEO of Oki Data Corporation, revealed on a recent trip to Sydney.

Harman gives the example of a merchandising company which wanted a printer which wouldn't automatically fuse the toner after it had been laid onto the paper. Oki engineers switched off the fuser in the printer so the customer could take the paper and apply the image to golfballs, cups and pens.

"You can have your name put onto any surface, then spray it with a chemical fuser to seal it," says Harman. Oki is working with that company because we see huge potential worldwide, even though the development is just in Australia, adds Harman.

HP is going back to the future with inkjets for business. HP claims ink has 50 percent lower cost per page and energy use than competitive laser printers for a similar cost of hardware. It points to the Officejet Pro 8500 all-in-one, its flagship inkjet that it launched last year, as a strong contender.

Inkjet suffers from the perception that it is a Trojan horse for printer vendors chasing the more profitable consumables market - the razor-blade model. Consumer inkjet printers have been sold through Australia Post outlets for $80 a unit or less, with replacement toners often more than the original selling price.

HP's Bailey says it's PhotoSmart consumer range is "a different model" to the OfficeJet Pro range, which promises productivity for SMB and enterprise. "Obviously we are trying to cross over because we think we have a legitimate value proposition for ink in business," he says.

The vendor has had success in the retail sector with low-end inkjets, which have a lower cost of printing and smaller footprints than lasers.

Another angle of attack is energy efficiency, or green solutions. HP has released LaserJet laser printers which have low start-up times (the LaserJet 3010 series) or timers to switch off printers (the CP5220 series). Users can reduce energy use by as much as 50 percent with the LaserJet 3010 series, HP claims.

Australian owned and managed Imagetec has an exclusive distribution deal with Konica Minolta to sell its products here under the Develop brand. The company, also a premier HP partner, targets the 20-150 seat market with machines for desktop to print room, with preferred speeds over 40 pages per minute. It is looking for resellers in regional areas to complement its city-based direct sales force.

Imagetec's printers are modular; customers buy a base unit and add options such as holepunching, security, biometric identification, standard finisher, booklet maker and banner finishing. The modular approach lets customers future-proof their purchases against obsolescence and reduces costs for the manufacturer, claims the vendor.

Security is "becoming more and more concerning for people in the general market", says Imagetec's Glen Morrison, national manager, production print solutions. Companies have a duty of care for information they gather. "People are starting to think of how much the data is worth and what will happen
if it escapes," he says.

One plug-in is a biometric adapter which scans the veins in the finger rather than the fingerprint. The scanner acts as a proximity card to automatically identify the user and his or her permissions, security levels and save/email preferences. Once authenticated the machine will give users the option to scan to their personal folders or directly email their own contacts.

A $363 Bluetooth module lets users print directly from their mobile phone. "It's been interesting already. We didn't know how much we would use this," says Morrison. An employee can print confidential documents from their mobile without having to send it through the company network.

Another security measure is watermarking. A document printed with a watermark will be rejected by a Develop machine - the job is automatically deleted from its memory and the user will not be able to scan, fax, email or copy the document. A password can be encoded into the watermark to give certain people access.

However, the watermark feature only works on Develop devices, and so would be less useful to
a company with a mixed-vendor fleet.