KODAK INKJETS DOOMED TO FAIL SAYS EPSON

[Anonymous]

Kodak inkjets doomed to failure, says Epson
June
2007 Epson has taken the extraordinary step of naming and shaming
manufacturers and products that it feels aren’t living up to its
standards. HP, Canon and Kodak were all accused of falling short of the
mark during a press launch for a new range of printers and
multifunction devices.First up for a bloodied nose was Kodak. Epson
welcomed the former-film company into the market but the knives were
soon out. ‘I doubt the Kodak proposition will work,’ said Robert Clark,
Epson’s Director of Inkjet Business. He claimed Kodak’s printers would
reach the end of their life-cycles before the consumer had recouped the
cost of the hardware through cheaper ink.To back up its claims, Epson
commissioned a study from TUV Rheinland into ink efficiency. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, Epson’s cartridges were found to be highly efficient,
with single-ink tanks more efficient than the tri- or five-colour tanks
used by competitors such as HP.

Again, Kodak came in for a
bludgeoning, with Hartmut Muller-Gerbes from TUV saying the study had
found the EasyShare 5300 used just 36 per cent of the ink in its tanks
before one colour ran out and the cartridge had to be discarded. It was
the worst performer in the test. Clark said ’64 per cent wastage is
pretty outlandish’, but that he was ‘not picking on Kodak’.But
efficiency isn’t everything in a printer, and Epson was reluctant to
discuss specific page yields and costs at its launch event, instead
referring reporters to official ISO yields.Muller-Gerbes admitted that
TUV’s test wasn’t interested in ‘how much money the consumer would
waste’, but the ‘ecological outcome’. Later, however, in an unguarded
moment, he said ‘this is a marketing point of view’, and it doesn’t
take a particularly fertile imagination to see how consumers might be
more worried about the cost of their prints than discarding a few
millilitres of unused ink.

Scanner attack
Epson also launched
an attack on its scanner rivals. The company made a point of
demonstrating the minimal difference between the HP G4050’s 48-bit and
96-bit scanning. A few minutes later, fingers were pointed at the
Canoscan 8600F for its poor performance in Epson’s tests.Then, in a
different breakout session, Epson held up HP’s range of office inkjet
printers as a specific example of products that slower than its
own.Fierce competition in the printer market is nothing new, but
traditional shorthand for close rivals in the IT industry is normally
simply ‘our competitor’.Clark defended Epson’s unusually aggresive
stance, claiming: ‘I took the decision to do it… to give you more
value’, describing the indistinct ‘competitors’ term as ‘nebulous’. But
old habits die hard: ‘you might see more of it from our competitors,’
he suggested.

[Author]

June 18, 2007 at 10:09 AM