Canon develops printer for digital TV broadcasts
TOKYO
– Canon Inc. said on Thursday it has developed a printer that can print
information from digital TV broadcasts and aims to expand the business
to 100 billion yen in five years.
Canon
plans to launch the ink jet printer in Japan in the autumn of next year
ahead of the nationwide rollout of terrestrial digital broadcasts late
next year, estimating the domestic market for it will reach 4.8 million
units by 2011.
The printer will likely cost about 50,000 yen in Japan and will be launched in the U.S. and Europe at a later date, it said.
The
world‘s top maker of copiers and cameras is aggressively investing in
the development of new products, keen to cultivate new growth drivers
as competition in the office equipment market intensifies and growth in
the digital camera market slows.
Canon, which competes in the ink
jet printer market with Seiko Epson Corp. , Hewlett-Packard CO. and
Lexmark International Inc. , said the printer would be used primarily
to make hard copies of information related to a TV program rather than
still images of what appears on the screen.
“If there was a TV
commercial say for a pizza delivery place, perhaps there would be a
discount coupon that you could print out,” Canon spokesman Richard
Berger said.
The printer could help Canon achieve its strategy of
establishing a larger presence in people‘s living rooms, complementing
a new type of flat panel TV co-developed with Toshiba Corp. and
scheduled for launch early next year.
Supporting a common connection
standard, the new printer will be compatible with liquid crystal
display (LCD) and plasma display televisions, as well as Canon and
Toshiba‘s own surface conduction electron emitter display (SED) TVs.