THE NEWS IN PRINT

For News in Print readers, the post regarding a Brother printer toner cartridge that was diagnosed as empty by the printer and yet, went on to print plenty of prints after a little tweak, may be still fresh. Staying on the same subject, a consumer law firm in the US has taken Samsung to court on similar grounds.

The suitor claims that Samsung designs its printers to falsely flash an empty cartridge message and ask users to replace the cartridge. The suit alleges that flashing false diagnostic messages even when there is a significant amount of toner left in the cartridge, enables manufacturers to make money by forcing consumers to purchase unneeded additional ink cartridges.

The suit also alleges that Samsung should have informed users that that a significant amount of toner is leftover when the printer flashes such messages.

“We’re simply asking Samsung to be straight with its customers,” says the suitor. “It’s disappointing that it’s taking a judge and a jury to make them do the right thing.”

Analysing the suit, there may be one more count which is being left out of the suit. Printer manufacturers can also be sued for their anti-green initiatives for filling landfills with toxic inks. Either way, they are getting what they truly deserve.

While all printer manufacturers are pitching in to help protect the environment, HP has gone a step ahead and is planning on conducting sessions with customers to identify where paper could be saved.

Hewlett-Packard imaging and printing senior vice president Christopher Morgan said in an interview to an Australian TV - “Many times, documents are printed when they could really be dealt with in digital form.”

The HP VP felt that organisations must importantly understand where it stands in the environmental footprint to take a complete view of the situation, including the equipment currently being used and the processes employed by workers.

“The savings that can be made in organisations is significant,” Morgan says. “You’ll never get rid of paper totally, but through efficient planning you can reduce the volume.”

HP’s Print 2.0 is specifically designed to address this issue. The software integrates all the corporate applications and places documents in appropriate places and hence reducing the need to print. It also scans documents and transmits to recipients to avoid printing.

The trends of sales suggest that smaller printer manufacturers are beginning to disappear into oblivion and the major manufacturers are stamping their mark all over the market. A report published by Gartner claims that HP has strengthened its position in the EMEA printing products tree while smaller vendors are losing ground.

In the first half of 2008, the total number of shipments (printers, copiers and multifunctional products) into EMEA has increased by 2.2% to 23.8 million over the same period last year. Other regions experienced a larger rise at 14+%.

HP’s shipments saw a steep incline of 6% taking it to the top, at 44.6% share in the market. Canon secured the second spot with a rise of 10.6% and captured 16.4% of the market. Epson gained by 22.5% and controls 12.9% of the market. Brother dropped its share by a dip of 0.9% and currently has a 6.3% market share. Samsung has leapfrogged Lexmark to claim the fifth spot.

Manufacturers outside top five have dropped by a whopping 28% this year to 3.63 million. Market share has plummeted from 19.5% to 13.7%.

Tosh Prabhakar, senior research analyst at Gartner, said - “The results for the first half of 2008 showed single-digit growth across the print markets in EMEA, with second quarter results showing signs of an economic slowdown which could continue into the rest of the year.”

via Channel Web

Leader in A3 printing, OKI Data is all set to launch C9850, an A3 colour printer at Total Print! Expo which is scheduled to take place between 14th and 16th of October at Earls Court 2, London.

The to-be-released printer is targeted at commercial or in-plant operations and features an EFI Fiery System 8e controller and Smart Rip technology.

The printer that is based on digital LED printing technology can handle a maximum duty cycle of 150,000 pages per month. Printing speeds for A3 mono is 21ppm and A3 colour is 19ppm. A4 printing speeds are excellent at 40ppm for mono and 36ppm for colour. The printer takes around 11 seconds to warm up.

Maintenance is at a bare minimum as the EP cartridge churns out 30,000 full prints and the toner cartridge 15,000 full prints from each cartridge.

Pricing information has not been revealed to us.

OKI will also exhibit Degrava DP 8500 and C9650XF proofer at the show. DP 8500 is a 600dpi short-run label printer, which is targeted at colour labels, tag and other narrow web applications. C9650XF is an A3 printer that produces 19 colour A3 proofs per minute or 21 A3 pages in mono operation.

VAR Business magazine has named Xerox as the Company of the Year in the colour printers category. This is the sixth time in the last seven years that Xerox has bagged this award. Along with this honour, Xerox has also claimed the Overall Winner award as well.

The awards were chosen from an annual survey conducted by the magazine. An excess of 5000 solution providers provided their inputs for this survey. Xerox earned top scores for product innovation and support, surpassing all competitors in the workgroup colour printer category.

“For 23 years we’ve asked Solution Providers to grade their vendor partners on criteria such as product quality and innovation, partner programs and support,” said Robert C. DeMarzo, senior vice president and editorial director, Everything Channel editorial. “The results of these grades make up the VARBusiness Annual Report Card which reflects the level of commitment vendors have to the channel and to their Solution Provider partners. Congratulations to Xerox for this most deserved recognition.”

We are in the month of August and yet, Xerox has claimed over 100 awards world-wide. PC World rated Xerox’s Phaser 6180MFP as the Top Choice under colour printing category. L’Ordinateur Individuel in France honoured Phaser 6125 with Recommended Product award. Phaser 8560MFP was named BERTL’s Best recipient as the Best Office/Small Workgroup Ink-Based MFP.

It is obvious that Xerox is garnering all the top honours world-wide and being a relatively new comer into the printing field, it is quite an achievement. We would like to congratulate Xerox Corporation for the awards it has bagged and the green efforts undertaken.

Kodak has bagged the PC Magazine’s 2008 Readers’ Choice Award in the Printer Category. The magazine had launched awards for several categories ranging from desktops to media players. Around 20,000 votes were cast across all categories.

It was revealed that PC Magazine readers rated Kodak’s all-in-one printer ink as the best for photo quality and low printing costs compared to other market competitors. It’s surprising to see users rate a printer ink as economical, at least by comparison.

Susan Tousi, general manager of Kodak’s Inkjet Systems Division said - “We’re thrilled to learn that consumers have embraced our family of all-in-one inkjet printers and have truly benefited from the quality of our premium inks and revolutionary value proposition,

“We bring consumers intuitive products that provide superb-quality and allow them to save up to 50 percent on everything they print.”

Kodak leverages upon its patented KODACOLOR Technology. This technology is a combination of four key elements — pigment-based inks, micro-porous photo papers, color and image science, and the Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) print head.

Kodak is the Official Imaging Sponsor of the Olympic Games 2008 to be held at Beijing between August 8th and 24th.

Kodak has lent technical support to create accreditation badges, provide onsite image-rich printing and publishing services, and support thousands of photojournalists capturing the action of the Olympic Games for news media worldwide.

The camera manufacturer is estimated to cater to the needs of more than 1,500 professional photographers and news agencies with traditional and digital media with around 6 million images.

Kodak has employed digital printing technology at an on-site location. NEXPRESS digital colour production press will be installed to produce all photographs including postcards, newsletters and poster-sized prints of key images.

Antonio M. Perez, Kodak Chairman and Chief Executive Officer said - “Dating back to the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, Kodak has been there to help capture and preserve the history, while also supporting the athletes. We’re proud to play that role again in Beijing.”

Memjet, the technology that has the potential to sweep the printing market and swoosh other printer manufacturers, is not expected to be released commercially until sometime in 2009. This is good news for major printer manufacturers such as HP, Canon, and Brother among others.

This super printing technology was scheduled to hit the market earlier this year, but due to some unmentioned reasons, it has been put off. According to Silverbrook, A4/letter printhead and related components will be shipped to OEMs by the end of this year, with products slated for sometime in 2009.

The OEMs necessarily spells good news for other manufacturers. It is clear that Memjet will not enter the market under their brand name; instead, they’re going to sell the components to OEMs, who can put their own stamp on the technology.

What Memjet does is hard to believe: It prints letter-size output at 60 ppm—that’s one page per second—with a 1,600- by 1,600-dot-per-inch (dpi) printer that Silverbrook says will be available in 2008 for maybe $200 to $300. Not only that, but the projected cost per page is less than 2 cents for a monochrome page and less than 6 cents for a color page.

A Memjet spokeswoman said - “The Company has been doing demonstrations for business partners and potential partners for many months, including demonstrations at DRUPA last month.

“DRUPA is billed as the “largest printing equipment exhibition in the world,” she said.

Ricoh is all set to display its high volume printer, the Pro C900 at Total Print! Expo for the very first time in the UK. The kit is expected to be the biggest exhibitor at the show to be held in Earls Court 2 London and runs from October 14th till the 16th.

Other printers on display will be the Pro 1356EX and MPC7500 with E7100 Fiery server.

C900 features a Fiery RIP that can print at speeds of 90ppm and can handle a paper capacity of 300gsm.

A RIP (Raster Image Processor) is a software (even when called “hardware RIP it is still just software, which is explained in the FLAAR Report which is available from our university). This software takes your image and text and tells the wide format printer where and how to place each squirt of ink on the paper. The PostScript (from Adobe or an emulation from Harlequin or comparable) tells the printer how to make the alphanumeric portion of your text look nice (eliminates the jaggies). (via LFP)

Along with the device, Ricoh will exhibit a range of in-line finishing kit for the C900 that includes a ring binder, perfect binder, Plockmatic booklet maker and GBC punch unit.

All enterprise mobile solutions like Blackberry, HTC, among others have provided the option of directly printing onto a network printer. The much hyped iPhone has disappointed all its groupies so far in this regard. Neither did the original iPhone carry any component to print wirelessly nor does the latest 3G model. There is wide speculation that an upgrade in the iPhone operating system could carry wireless printing capability.

Currently, iPhone users transfer files-to-be-printed onto a computer to run the print job. It’s a tad annoying to transfer files off multiple machines to accomplish a simple task of taking a printout.

An analysis conducted on the iPhone 2.0 operating system source code reveals the presence of an empty printer directory. Experts are speculating that the new upgrade 2.0.1 will possess direct wireless printing capabilities.