ALERTS COPIER VENDORS…HP IS COMING !

[Anonymous]

Alerts Copier Vendors: HP is Coming
Lyra Research
Newton, MA  DEC, 2006 — Lyra Research,HP is targeting the convenience color copier market with its new Edgeline technology, and Lyra believes the results of this new effort will be much different from HP’s previous attempts to penetrate the copier market. Canon, Konica Minolta, Ricoh, Xerox and other copier vendors may have something to worry about.HP announced Edgeline at an October 3 analyst briefing. Edgeline is an extension of the thermal ink jet scalable printing technology (SPT) that HP announced in July 2005. Basically, Edgeline puts print heads built with SPT technology into a page-wide array, meaning that the print heads remain stationary during the printing process while paper is passed beneath them. At the briefing, HP stated that it would launch a departmental color copier based on Edgeline technology in the spring of 2007. Assuming that the machine has the same color print speed (70 ppm) as the device that was demonstrated at the October 3 press conference, the new model will be competitive with the fastest convenience color copiers that are currently on the market.”With this new model, HP will finally be playing in the ‘sweet spot’ of the digital copier market. Shipments of convenience color copiers in North America are growing at around 15 percent per year, and revenue is growing even faster at approximately 30 percent per year,” states Steve Reynolds, senior analyst at Lyra. “As for the technology itself, I believe that Edgeline is a distinct threat to all laser-based color printers and MFPs.”Lyra forecasts that HP will claim a 2 percent share of the worldwide market for convenience color copiers in 2007, based on sales of approximately 7,000 units. Lyra’s projection is based on the assumption that the HP product will start to sell slowly, with early adopters purchasing the device first and the bulk of the market waiting to assess the results of other firms’ early deployments of the new technology. In 2008, the first full year of shipments, HP’s market share will rise significantly.

[Author]

December 6, 2006 at 11:42 AM