HP Canon & Epson Ink, Lexmark, Brother Toner cartridge Printer Ink Cartridges News

HP launches two-pronged defence

There are lies, damned lies, and press releases. The battle for inkjet cartridge mindset and consumers’ cash has long been a contentious issue as the OEM printer manufacturers strive to protect their very profitable piece of turf in a market worth $25 billion worldwide. Printer manufacturers successfully play on fear, uncertainty and doubt (the so-called FUD factor) while their competitors play successfully on lower prices and environmental benefits, despite the FUD propaganda.

The latest battle in the war of words takes the form of a two-pronged strike by HP. The first arm of its pincer movement was the recent publication of a comparative report claiming better page yields and higher quality results from HP brand cartridges compared to refills. The firm’s second strike against the refiller market was the announcement that its new cartridges now come in two sizes, with one costing much less (and printing fewer pages).
The authors of the comparative report claimed that “European research firm Innovationstechnik proves original HP inkjet cartridges print more and are more reliable than alternatives”. Since the report was commissioned by HP, it is fair to assume we may never have heard about it if the researchers had reached the opposite conclusion.
The report concluded that HP ‘originals’ print 34% more pages than compatible alternatives and 69% more than refilled cartridges. The commissioned report also concluded that more than one in five compatible alternatives was dead on arrival or failed prematurely and that one in three refills was DoA or failed prematurely. The test covered 1,000 inkjet cartridges from 16 established European suppliers, including Pelikan, Staples, Tesco, Cartridge World and Vobis.

HP’s advertising in Britain recently led to a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority by the UK Cartridge Recyclers Association by suggesting that using refilled cartridges was like “eating used food” and by suggesting that the environmental benefits of recycled cartridges were of little significance.

After collating material from focus groups, market research and help desk calls, HP concluded that its inkjet customers’ profile can be broadly divided into two groups. One comprises low-level users who want low prices. By contrast, the second group prints more pages and is more concerned about long term values and infrequent intervention rates. So now HP provide two cartridge sizes. Its Standard pack prints about 200 pages (rated by the ISO/IEC 24711 system of calculating yield), and costs £7.99. The Value pack has more ink, yielding about 1,000 pages and reducing the cost per page by between 35 and 55%, HP claims. A third type, the photo cartridge, will be available for some printers for premium quality and enhanced performance.

All major OEM suppliers are caught up in ink wars. Epson’s main battle is with the compatible cartridge manufacturers - of which there are hundreds in Asia, according to Iain Friar, Epson’s European IP manager. He says Epson has a robust patent enforcement policy, with 25 infringement cases settled in Europe in the past 18 months.
Friar said a high proportion of printers returned to service centres contained non-Epson cartridges. He said most problems resulted from dirty ink, bubbles, and the use of conventional ink in printers designed for pigments, which have different characteristics.

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HP Laserjet P2014 Mono Printer

Just launched by HP the Laserjet P2014 is aimed squarely at the Small Office/Home Offcie environment.

There’s little software other than the driver and this is fairly basic. There’s no duplex facility on the machine, so the main software options are multi-page prints, watermarks - though no overprints - and resolution selection. The three print quality options are 600dpi, FastRes 1200 (emulated 1200 dpi) and ProRes 1200, progressively better and better. Selections are obvious and the layout of the driver is conventional and easy to work your way around.

HP claims the LaserJet P2014 can print up to 23 pages per minute and our five-page text document completed in 18 seconds, which equates to 17ppm. Considering this includes processing and rasterising time, which most printer manufacturers don’t include in their print speed figures, 17ppm is pretty good. There’s very little warm-up time to this printer, which starts printing quickly, even when it’s been asleep for a while. This is an important feature, because a personal laser printer is unlikely to be printing anywhere near continuously. Typical use will probably see only a few documents printed each day, within long periods of sleep. This means most print jobs will include any start-up time and without the need to warm-up a fuser, the printer will be quicker overall than those that have to wait.

So, does the printer reduce its start-up time by keep it’s fuser hot all the time, in which case it will be using lots of power, even when asleep? It draws just 7W in sleep mode, about half the consumption of an energy-saving lamp, so it’ll use a unit in just under six days.

Print speeds for our text and graphics and the photo page files are both good, with 18 seconds for the former and a fairly blistering eight seconds for the photo print - 7.5ppm. Even when we switched to the higher resolution ProRes mode, it only took 11 seconds.

Using HP’s Q7553 cartrdiges, the Q7553A version gives about 3,000 Pages and the Q7553X version up to 7,000 which gives a price per page of about £0.12. Stinkyink are offering a remanufactured cartridge(STQ7553X), which they claim gives an output equivalent to the manufacturers and works out at about £0.006 per page.

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HP Launch Print 2.0

Yesterday HP announced their own Autumn line up of new printer hardware, but also revealed their thoughts on how the future of printing will be evolving. Printing for HP is the foundation of their whole business, and generates over 26% of HP’s total quaterly revenues, so what they do now all the others will strive to emulate. However printer demand has been shrinking fast in recent years across most sectors. The growth of MFPs (Multi Function Printers) has slowed from 35.3% in 2004 to 30.5% in 2005 and 19.2% in 2006 according to figures from IDC. Sales of laser MFPs and laser single function printers showed similar trends, while single funtion inkjet printes have suffered worst of all with annual global shipments shrinking by 8.4% in 2004, 9.6% in 2005 and a massive 21.6% in 2006 IDC reported. HP currently holds 55% worldwide share of the Laser Printer market which far surpasses second placed Samsung with 10%. In inkjet machines, HP’s share is 45% compared with second placed Canon with a 26% share.

After Brother, Canon and Epson have all recently announced new printers for the new season, HP have just unveiled a raft of new hardware, which will be available during the next few months here in the UK, but Print 2.0 underpins the whole corporate strategy for their future. Embracing change in the way that people use the internet and also changes in the way that we print HP are seeking to offer all of their users ways to enhance their print experience. Bearing in mind the broad customer base that HP enjoys, and the different demands from their customers they are trying to offer common solutions to everybodies unique printing demands with Print 2.0.

HP say that half of all consumer printing comes from the web, and I guess our own experience bears that out, but small business is also trending in that direction. With more and more content appearing on the internet in the form of Web-based applications such as Google Docs, Web pages and even blogs becoming more important the problem that I am sure we have all experienced is formatting them so that they appear OK when printed.

Print 2.0 is conceived to incorporate various services and solutions designed for their customers which range from the average consumer to small and medium sized business right through to the corporate enterprise. “With Print 2.0 we’re leveraging the power of the Web as a gateway for our customers to communicate, collaborate and publish their content in ways they could not before”, Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP’s imaging and printing group, said today in a written statement.

With colour printing playing an increasingly important role for small business’s enabling them to produce small runs of very professional documents in house, which in the past would have had to be put out to a printing house, HP have created an SMB community online site designed for small business’s. This is a Portal which will give small business’s a place to create their materials and then print them through the medium of their choice – in house, through a retail outlet or a local commercial print shop.

Probably the biggest change that people will notice over the coming months is the ‘Print It’ Button which will be embedded into web pages. You know the problem, you want to print some content, but when it is outputted there are adverts and big blocks obscuring your text and it runs over several pages. Utilising the ‘Print It’ button will automatically layout the page for best printed appearance and also allow you to edit the output so that you only see what you want. This technology is being actively supported by both Yahoo and Microsoft and here at Stinkyink we will be enabling it as we enhance our own website.

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Well, HP have come out with an absolutley sizzling set of results for the second quarter. Following close on the heels of Lexmark, Xerox and Epson all reporting results in line with our summer so far, HP is undoubtedly the star of the show - and we say hurragh to them!.

The company’s quarter resulted in a 16 per cent year-over-year rise in revenue to $25.4bn. Net income surged as well, rising 29 per cent to $1.8bn “We had our strongest revenue growth since 2000,” said HP’s CEO Mark Hurd.

All divisions performed well, with strong gains in the PC market (where they have been the number 1 for nearly a year now), but where we are interested in the printing segment they reported that they boosted revenue 8 per cent to $6.8bn and turned in a $981m profit, up from $884m.

Watch this space, as we say ‘Well done to HP’ they truly are the market leader

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Following on from their disappointing mid quarter results, the Shares in Lexmark inc climbed on the New York Stock exchange yesterday.

Shares rose 3.3% on revised analysts forecasts for the full year, but the market remains tough for Lexmark with Epson and HP both releasing new products over the summer and autumn pressurising prices and market share.

However sunnier times for Lexmark at the moment

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