THE NEWS IN PRINT

Xerox, a company known mostly for the photocopiers has won heaps of awards in the first six months of FY-07 in the printing department. It has been recognised by the leading IT publications and test and research organisations around the world. It has amassed 127 awards into its kitty so far.

Testing organisations also praised Xerox's digital production systems. Better Buys for Business awarded the Xerox 4110 Enterprise Printing System, the Xerox Nuvera 100/120/144 EA Digital Production System and the DocuColor 8000AP Digital Press with 'Editor's Choice' designations. Additionally, the Xerox Nuvera 288 Digital Perfecting System took home the 'Best in Show' award in the monochrome digital printing equipment category at the On Demand tradeshow in April, and the DocuColor 260 Digtial Color Printer / Copier received an honourable mention in the Process Colour Digital Printing Equipment category.

During a hands-on review, Xerox Phaser 8560/N printer has received accolades from the editor-in-chief of Computer Shopper. He has been highly impressed with its high quality colour prints and the speed at which the outputs are obtained. He also praised the low cost per page maintained by Xerox which he terms as a crucial factor for consumers to go for it.

Xerox will showcase various award-winning offerings at several industry events during the remainder of 2007 including Photoshop World in Las Vegas, Graph Expo in Chicago, and Interface in Seattle.

With these many recognitions, there is no doubt that Xerox will emerge as one of the industry leaders in months / years to come. It will be interesting to see the marketing strategy to ebb out HP, Kodak and Canon out of the market.

via Graphic Repro

Experts have begun postmortem with investigations into Lexmark's Q2 loss. The expenditure chart of Lexmark was compared with that of other major companies and a grand observation was unravelled. The spending on research and development by Lexmark is 10 times lesser than the big enchilada of the printing industry, HP.

Lexmark, which reported second-quarter earnings Tuesday that showed declines in revenue and earnings, blamed much of its recent softness on slow sales of both inkjet printers and inkjet printer supplies. At the same time, rival Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, Calif., has been aggressively integrating its proprietary print-head technology into its inkjet devices to increase performance and push pricing down.

R&D is a major weapon in any industry that deals with customers directly. Other brands have been able to bring out technologies that have helped customers dearly by improving the quality of printing, simultaneously reducing the prices of printers, cartridges and accessories. Kodak, a baby in the industry has risen to great heights with its trademark Micro Piezo technology.

Hopefully, this is the wake up call Lexmark needed to fund their researchers to up their ante. Some may say its never too late, but in the printing industry, the earlier the better.

via CRN

Some colour laser printers are printing an invisible grid of yellow dots on all printouts. These yellow dots store the serial number of the printer and time stamp of the printed page.

A website has been setup called seeingyellow.com by members of MIT Media Labs' Computing Culture research group which is built to protest against the watermarks produced which is clearly a violation of civil liberties of laser printer users.

The yellow-dot "watermark" allows the US Secret Service to enlist the help of the manufacturers in tracking counterfeit currency generated on laser printers. A statement on seeing yellow.com calls this practice a "direct attack on the privacy of the owners and users of printers, and in particular, on their right to free, anonymous speech."

A decoder is available on Electronic Frontier Foundation for the Xerox DocuColor colour laser printout. It states the process of reading the date, time, and printer serial number from forensic tracking codes.

Printer manufacturers like HP, Brother and others have been following this practice in the laser printer industry. There have been no reports of countries in the European Union following a similar practice.

via Dr.Dobb's

Lexmark International has announced its Q2 financial results and the trend is heading downward. The company attributed the losses towards cheaper hardware and reduced sales in ink cartridges.

According to Lexmark officials, the company erred by focusing on making and selling more expensive ink-jet devices and laser printers, rather than the low-end ink-jets that drive profits through the sale of ink-jet cartridges.

The reduced prices by Kodak, and HP's domination have led to Lexmark's reduction in revenue. Third party cartridges have not helped Lexmark's profits either.

Lexmark expects a similar Q3 financial result as well as they do not have any significant strategy to negate the descending revenue.

via e Week

HP is looking at new domains to venture in the computer industry. It has recently tied up with Nantero, a company that develops nonvolatile memory based on carbon nanotubes (CNTs), in a bid to produce flexible electronic devices. The partnership will integrate two technologies which when combined could produce printable memory like RFID tags.

Nanotube memory is like any other memory that we use on a daily basis. Some examples would be random access memory(RAM), flash memory etc. NT memory is expected to be denser than the currently popular flash memory which results in miniaturization of memory modules. Maybe we will see iPod nano as big as a wrist watch if the NT memory technology takes off.

Nantero said - HP's TIPS R&D tool provides heads with multiple nozzles, large drop size range, and programmable volume. The collaboration is part of an HP initiative to extend HP inkjet printing technology into applications where accurate placement of small drops and deposition of precise volumes of fluid is required.

via EE Times