THE NEWS IN PRINT

In all my previous posts, I have been concentrating on the printing costs associated with the ink cartridges and toners. It never occurred to me that the printers that I reviewed are consuming power which was never measured nor discussed. A survey conducted by Dell on power consumption by laser printers inspired me to write this post which should be a cost reduction initiative for all companies around the globe.

Laser printers are not efficient economically when lightly used. Hence when a laser printer is used as a personal printer as opposed to a network printer, it consumes an awful amount of power and thereby raising the power bills. Dell claims that personal laser printers cost £50 per year in power costs alone and £3 for a networked laser printer.

"There are thousands of personal printers out there, because IT staff feel people need them," said Stephen Burt, Dell's European imaging business manager. Around 40 percent of these in business are personal laser printers, he said which are power-hogs: "The power costs are much greater than the toner costs."

This survey by Dell should be an eye opener for many companies and hopefully should work in favour of reducing the cost for companies and more importantly, reduce the power consumption.

via Techworld

If you are an ardent follower of CSI, you would have probably seen CSI agents trying to put the shredded pieces of paper together manually in search of clues. It seemed as an arduous task with the different permutations and combinations that were needed to reverse the process of paper shredding. German scientists have developed a computer program that will undo the process of paper shredding. These researchers are trying to piece together 45 million pages of secret police files ripped into 600 million pieces. These files were torn up by hand by the agents of East Germany's Secret Service (Stasi) 18 years ago.

The pieces of torn documents are scanned on both sides, and the digital images are then analysed by a cluster of 16 computers for 25 features, including colour, shape, texture, handwriting and typeface.

The technology seems uncomplicated with mixing and matching of different patterns. But, who will undertake the task of scanning a billion pieces of paper? Maybe they are missing out on the contusions caused on the edges while being torn apart. Torn paper edges will have a specific pattern when shredded manually which could be exploited while bringing them together.

If this paper unshredder becomes successful, the industry should start looking for better choices of disposing confidential documents like burning or crushing.

via Crunch Gear

The printing market may seem like a big players' arena, but small printing companies like Oki Printing Solutions (OPS) are quietly releasing new printers and introducing new schemes. Last week Oki released a wide array of printers ranging from dot matrix to colour printers.

OPS introduced the 9 pin MC 1120, 24 pin MC 1190, C800 and C8600 Color printers along with the B2500, B2540, MC 1120 and MC 1190 entry level dot matrix printers. The B2500 and 2540 are all-in-one printers, which are just a few of the other new printers that were released. OKI claims that dot matrix printers are still in use printing invoices and other applications as they are a much cheaper option than using an inkjet printer.

"OPS is committed to helping people make the most of their in-house printing capability. We want to continue this work and demonstrate to the business users with pursuit"�, Emmanuel Emenike, the marketing manager of OPS said at Lagos during the unveiling event.

"OPS is the first to demystify the world of print delivery easy in adopting solutions. We are well known in different part of the world either dominating and making tremendous part in the market", he said.

More printers being released into the market gives consumers more choices, but at the same time it can be confusing while shopping for printers. If you are planning on purchasing a new Oki printer you'll be glad to know that there are a wide range of cheap OKI cartridges and toners available from Cartridge SAVE.

via This Day Online

We've all been there. You're stuck in the middle of a new design or layout with a shade on in mind that you would like to use as part of the design. The problem is you are struggling to convert the thoughts in your (rather drained) brain to the technical hex code that is understood by Photoshop. My goodness, at times I wish my computer was capable of directly taking the thoughts in my mind and translating into whatever code it needs.

Xerox has set out to make this real as revealed when they filed for a patent called 'Natural Language Color Editing'. This technology will be able to decipher the words that come out of our mouth to readjust the colours in the graphic program. For example, I can say "Green a little lighter. Change the red to reddish brown, slightly darker. Yes, that's what I wanted"� and bingo, I have what I want.

Speaking at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC), Geoffrey Woolfe, principal scientist in the Xerox Innovation Group introduced this concept.

"The innovative part of this is the mapping language," Woolfe said. "At Xerox we've found that if you can connect the human dimension to the mathematical dimension, you get a lot of usability."

Users can type "make the sky a deeper blue" or give a voice command "make the background carnation pink" and the software does the work. The invention, still in the research stage, creates "color language" by translating human descriptions of color into the precise numerical codes that machines use to print color documents.

"Today, especially in the office environment, there are many non-experts who know how they would like color to appear but have no idea how to manipulate the color to get what they want," said Geoffrey Woolfe, principal scientist in the Xerox Innovation Group. "You shouldn't have to be a color expert to make the sky a deeper blue or add a bit of yellow to a sunset."

This development could lead to colour adjustments on office devices like colour printers and commercial printing machines without the hassle of tinkering with HEX codes or RGB. Or it could make printing very very stressful indeed!

via Xerox Corporation News Release

Kodak has found a short path to printer business monopoly by slashing the prices of printer ink cartridges. Kodak 5100 cartridges are available for as low as £5 for black and £7.50 for colour cartridges while the printer itself costs just £75. Kodak, a photography giant is clearly trying to make inroads into the printer business by luring customers with low prices.

Famed columnist, Walter Mossberg, decided to test the Kodak 5300 printer with alongside a HP Photosmart C6180 printer. The Kodak 5300 costs £100 while the competing HP Photosmart C6180 is priced at £150.

Here's the conclusion: My conclusion was that the Kodak EasyShare 5300 is a pretty good printer, with a good enough combination of quality, speed and functionality to satisfy people attracted by the lower ink costs. In my tests, it was better than the H-P at some things and worse at others. Read the full review.

In response to these cheap ink cartridges, HP has also announced production of cheaper ink cartridges for their future printers. Contrastingly, HP's lower priced cartridges contain less amount of ink as compared to full fledged volume of Kodak cartridges.