[Anonymous]

Intelligent Printing(UK)
Kevin White asks how printer vendors are driving improvements in speed, quality, reliability, cost and manageability.
Echoing
past trends in the newsprint, magazine, cinematography and television
industries, the enterprise printer estate is slowly making the
transition from mono printing to colour-capable machines. With parallel
advances in quality, speed and cost of ownership, the broader printer
market is getting a lot more colourful, too.
Hewlett-Packard, which
already has a 54% market share of the UK’s printer business, is
reporting strong demand. “Colour shipments increased by 47% in 2004
over 2003,” says Geoff Hogg, HP’s enterprise marketing manager, “and we
fully expect that in the first half of 2006 we will ship twice the
number of colour-capable printers than we did in the first half of
2005.” Market-watchers at IDC have pronounced that by 2010 the mono
printer will have become redundant.
If the growth of colour in the
office constitutes a major trend, it is not the only one that is
changing the nature of enterprise printer assets. Graham Lowes,
strategic planning director at OKI, says that we are entering a phase
where the migration from desktop printer to corporate workgroup and
departmental printing is accelerating. In parallel with that phased
move, the combination of scan, fax and copy functions onto a single
multi-purpose digital print device is gaining in popularity. “The MFP
is seen as offering offices an optimum level of flexibility,” says
Lowes.
But it is the emergence of intelligent print routing software
that has enabled enterprises to start looking at ways of more closely
mapping their overall print resources to actual print demands. Routing
programs can select the right printer for the job, whether the needs
are for simple text output, colour, duplex or high-volume printing
using an impact line printer or a high-speed laser workhorse machine.
Equally, software can distribute any one or all of the documents in a
job to multiple queues for printing, faxing or on into a workflow and
archiving suite.
Whatever the type of printers from whichever
vendor, an overriding aim is for a balanced deployment, Lowes argues,
so that colour-capable inkjets are positioned where they are most
needed, the high-end laser printers placed where there are enough duty
cycles to justify the investment, and multi-functional machines in
areas where their purpose is best utilised. In recent years, OKI has
pioneered single-pass colour printers, in which the machine’s print
stations are aligned in such a fashion that they can print all four
colours in a single pass, something that Lowes maintains makes its
printers more flexible in paper handling than conventional print
systems.
Whether a document is printed, copied, faxed or scanned, it
needs to be produced fast. Head of HP’s $24bn printer division, Vyomesh
Joshi, has adopted as his own a modified Moore’s Law, saying that HP
aims to double inkjet print speeds every 18 months. The company is just
coming out of a five-year, $1.4bn R&D initiative for scalable
printing technology (SPT), the aim of which is to allow HP to put more
ink nozzles on its print heads so that they can spray ink faster and at
higher densities than ever before.
Much of the printer industry’s
R&D effort is going into three aspects of print technology.
Advances are being made in new ink systems, in the toner and the print
head itself. “Toner and ink developments are fundamental to the
improvements we see coming onto market,” says Paul Birkett, business
manager at Xerox UK’s channel solutions group. “Xerox uses emulsion
aggregation toners, which are chemically grown from the ground up to
get perfectly spherical toner particles.”
The process is much more
effective than alternatives based on mechanical processes, says
Birkett. “The ink also contains fusing oil and the printer needs
virtually no additional fuser, which we believe improves the overall
print quality. It gives a very flat, natural look to a document.”
On
the horizon he points to the potential of the solid ink technology
acquired through the company’s takeover of Tektronix. Not only is it
more environmentally friendly than current techniques, massively
reducing the cost of waste cartridges and packaging, but is said to
make for a low maintenance option promising a much-reduced cost of
service.
HP has fashioned a system that separates the ink cartridge,
which holds the ink, from the print heads that deliver the ink to the
paper. That effectively fixes the ink supply, which allows a greater
amount of ink to be stored in the ink cartridges. The objective is
longer-life cartridges and less user intervention. “There are two other
advantages,” says Howard Roberts, HP printer division. “We do think it
leads to more effective use of each cartridge, but it also means that
we are only moving the print head and that means we can move it faster.
It’s like painting a wall with a roller instead of a brush.”
Latest
generation HP print heads are said to have a life expectancy of 90,000
pages or three years. For its new SPT printers, HP’s designers have
managed to squeeze up to 3,900 nozzles on a single print head. The
greater the number of nozzles the faster the ink is fired onto the
page, and the faster the print speeds attained. The high number of
nozzles also means more dots of ink can be sprayed in a square inch,
which provides a marked improvement in image quality.
But the
improved print quality is as much to do with ink developments, as it is
the print heads. “We have just launched Vivera, a new free-flowing ink
that contains some very carefully managed drying and anti-clogging
agents. Currently, the new inks are targeted at the home photo consumer
markets, but will slowly percolate into HP’s enterprise printers,” says
Roberts.
Of the first lines to incorporate the new STP technology,
the HP Photosmart 3310 All-in-One and the HP Photosmart 8250 printer
will output a four inch by six inch photograph in just four seconds,
cutting speeds to almost half that of current models.
The Office Jet
Pro K550 is the first in what is to set to become a long line of HP
business printers that incorporates STP and Vivera. In draft mode, it
is claimed that the system will output colour prints at a cost that is
comparable with mono laser printers, assuming a rate of 15% ink
coverage. That works out at roughly 1 pence a page, which looks very
appealing against the six-fold price premium that businesses should
currently expect to pay for a colour page over a mono print.
HP says
the K550 will print professional standard colour documents at speeds of
up to 10 pages a minute and black text documents at speeds of up to 12
pages per minute. It claims the unit cost is up to 30% lower in colour
cost per page than achieved in laser prints.
IDC suggests that a
balanced deployment of printers can produce savings of up to 23% in
typical enterprise deployments, based on industry averages, which
suggest a poorly managed printing regime can cost around £400 ($710) a
year a head in some organisations.
However, Lowes notes that it is
not unusual to encounter some push-back from users over print
rationalisation programmes, not only in terms of accessibility but in
the context of privacy and print job security as well, especially where
low-volume printers are consolidated and replaced by departmental
machines, taking the job away from easy reach of the desktop.
Concern
over information security is one issue the printer vendors say they
have covered. Some make use of encryption and IPSec tunnels to secure
the data flows of print jobs between a client machine and a remote
printer. And most vendors have now added the necessary access controls
and data protection features to their enterprise lines. Ricoh’s
printers can be set up to use the existing Windows network login
infrastructure to restrict unauthorised access and to limit the use of
specific devices such as colour-capable printers.
As Eddie Hall,
product manager at Ricoh UK, says, “One of the problems businesses see
straight away before they install colour is that people could start to
misuse the facilities and print out all sorts of documents
unnecessarily in colour, or use the assets excessively for personal
use. Uncontrolled access to colour is always going to be an issue.
That’s why we use a system that allows the administrator to set up a
series of rules to manage print security and control costs.
“If a
colour print job is authorised, but exceeds the volume limit set by the
administrator for that specified colour-capable printer, then the
system can be configured to advise a user to use another specified
networked printer that would be more cost efficient for that job.”
Ricoh’s
latest 3260C can produce output up to 45 pages per minute in full
colour and 60 a minute in black and white. Its role is one that is
intended to allow businesses with ‘print on demand’ requirements for
presentations, sales and marketing collateral and bespoke stationery to
reduce their dependence on outsourced print shops. To further support
this, the range comes with various finishing options such as a sheet
stapler and a booklet maker.
There has been a lot of focus on
manageability across all the key IT segments of desktops, servers and
the storage infrastructure, and the enterprise print asset base is no
different. As with most emerging technologies, each vendor has its own
approach.
But according to Harry Lewis, an IBM technician and
chairman of the IEEE-ISTO Printer Working Group, there is much being
done to promote vendor collaboration on open standards related to
printer fleet management: “This includes defining and standardising the
semantics of objects, attributes and elements to be managed and
defining a protocol for managing imaging systems as a web service,” he
says.
“An open standard to establish common industry semantics will
lead to more uniform reporting and control, which ultimately translates
into improved ability for the IT department to manage costs.”
These
standards are not being developed in a vacuum, but reach across
standards organisations for ongoing collaboration with the DMTF, Free
Software Group, CIP4-JDF and others.
As for IBM itself, Lewis points
to advances in the use of its BladeCenter technology to boost the
performance and flexibility of data-stream transforms. Notably, IBM
recently announced the IBM Infoprint Transform Manager, which helps
speed print jobs where time sensitive output is essential.
Most
document composition tools today create postscript or pdf files as the
de facto standard for electronic document exchange and presentation,
resulting in more complex print jobs that are loaded with variable data
and images. Infoprint Transform Manager runs on a dedicated server, and
seeks to counter this trend and help relieve bottlenecks when
transforming datastreams such as postscript, pdf, gif, tiff and jpeg
into advanced function presentation (AFP) print datastreams. AFP is the
industry-standard print architecture for printing and managing
sensitive documents.
Meanwhile, HP’s WebJet Admin or the CentreWare
Web client from Xerox are typical of the latest systems management
utilities available to administrators, who can now use a standard web
browser to set up and configure devices, check system status,
troubleshoot problems, or determine supply requirements without having
to touch a machine.
Email alerts on printer status and job queues
can be triggered to the help desk, and by querying an Active Directory
register of printers and user groups the administrator can call on the
system to set appropriate polling intervals so that jobs are run
according to priority.
For chargeback or lease-costing purposes,
most print systems will also spit out reports to track the use of any
networked SNMP compliant printer or multifunction device. Additional
metering programmes will automatically submit usage readings to the
vendor, eliminating manual collection and reporting and increasing
billing accuracy.

[Author]

February 14, 2006 at 9:47 AM