9-20-09
- BIG NEWS! Canon announced it will allow Hewlett Packard to sell most of its copier product line with Canon name. Details:
- Expansion of 25 year relationship between Canon and Hewlett Packard
- This is a one-way agreement, as Canon will NOT have access to HP devices
- HP will sell Canon branded b/w & color copiers from segment 2 up through segment 6
- Initially, HP will market the Canon brand, but then will switch to offering the Canon copiers with the HP name on them as soon as it develops HP JetDirect based print controllers for them
- All current HP LaserJet and Color LaserJet devices are made by Canon
- HP will also resell Canon’s imageWARE and MEAP solutions
- Canon is looking gain back marketshare when it lost all IKON locations when IKON sold out to Ricoh, and when DANKA sold out to Konica Minolta in the U.S.
- This is fifth time that HP has attempted to enter the office copier space
- HP will use expanded product offering to grow its Managed Print Services program
- “creating an integrated platform and brokering a network of service partners that will enable resellers to sell contractual print offerings”
- “create new global business unit”, called Managed Enterprise Solutions, led by Bruce Dahlgren (former Lexmark executive) and headquartered in San Diego, CA
- HP, which recently acquired IT services provider Electronic Data Systems (EDS), will use 500 certified EDS account managers to sell managed print services with this new expanded device offering to companies in the U.S. (EDS currently accounts for 20% of HP’s MPS sales)
- Claims that the total MPS opportunity in the U.S. is $121 billion annually including $64 billion for hardware and $57 billion for software
- Estimates there are $90 billion worth of sales in 8 million SMB (small to medium sized businesses)
- Estimates there are $45 billion worth of sales in 18,000 Enterprise accounts
- Estimates there are $76 billion worth of sales in 4,300 named accounts and public sector, which will be handled exclusively by HP/EDS factory direct sales reps
- Is targeting an annual growth rate for MPS of 17%
- Partnered with several distributors to offer managed print services offerings to VARs, including Synnex, Supplies Network, NER Data and United Stationers.
- Claims that it can save companies an average of 15% with its MPS program, but up to 30% is possible
- Recently won a MPS bid from Swiss Post of Switzerland and reduced printer fleet form 17,000 devices to just 6,000 including MFPs. Other customers include:
- Constellation Energy
- United Stationers
- GES Exposition Services
- CH2M Hill
- Wildon Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
- Embarq Corp.
- Alliant Techsystems
- Texas Department of Agriculture
- Viacom
- 3M -
- While HP will do the billing for contracts that include Canon branded devices, HP will subcontract the service to either Canon branches or Canon dealers, based on customer request
- Customers will contact HP to place service calls, and HP will then dispatch to Canon branch or dealer
- HP claims to have 2000 customers under MPS contracts, including 450,000 devices and 18 billion pages per year.
- HP claims to win 60% of all MPS bids it participates in.
- Canon announced that it will call its managed print services program; “Canon Managed Document Services”:
- Target is to reach annual revenue of 100 billion yen by 2012
- Will invest 20 billion yen to launch program worldwide
- Canon announced that it has sold its 500th device with the “imagePRESS” name worldwide. (remember that this also includes the imagePRESS C1, which is only a 15ppm color device)
- Canon announced that its devices will integrate with Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES systems to apply document security policies for scanned documents.
- Canon’s North American CEO, Joe Adachi, stated that when he next travels to Tokyo for a business meeting, he will try to convince the Japanese executives to move the worldwide headquarters from Tokyo to the new office that will be built in Melville, NY.
- Canon announced that it has created a video game to assist in training copier technicians. In the game, technicians must drag and drop the correct parts into the correct spot on a virtual copier.
- Canon announced that an option for its new imageRUNNER ADVANCE MFPs will allow end users to scan directly into Microsoft SharePoint.
- Canon announced more options for its imagePRESS production color systems:
- imageWARE PrePress Manager software to provide JDF capabilities
- Duplo DC-645 off-line slitter/cutter/creaser
- Standard Horizon BQ-270C perfect binder with HT-30 three sided trimmer (most in-line perfect binders only trim the face, not the top and bottom)
- Option to allow imagePRESS print server (relabeled EFI Fiery) to receive data from Agfa Apogee 6.0 DigitalPrint Link.
- uniFLOW Output Manager (OM) software
- cost accounting
- pin-code or ID badge authentication
- web-to-print
- job ticketing
- queue management
- prepress make ready
- operator management
- Universal print driver
- Preview first page of job before releasing to print
- Interactive rule based routing
- Authorization workflow
- Connection to eCopy
- pricing not announced
- Hewlett Packard launched a new desktop A4 color laser engine, the Color LaserJet CP3520 series featuring:
- Made by Canon (Canon sells it as the Canon imageRUNNER LBP5460)
- Base MSRP of $699.00 (fully loaded $1299.00)
- 4 tandem OPC drum design
- 350 sheet paper supply standard
- Up to 850 sheets maximum with options
- 256MB RAM standard (up to 1GB maximum)
- 30ppm top speed color or b/w
- 1200x600dpi
- Maximum duty cycle of 75K/month
- Recommended for 1.5K to 5K/month
- PCL & PostScript print drivers standard
- Optional auto duplex
- USB & 10/100/1000 BaseT ports
- Up to 43lb. paper in drawer and up to 58lb. paper in bypass
- Black toner cartridge for $109.06 for 5,000 pages (based on 5% per page coverage)
- Color toner cartridges for $264.99 each for 7,000 pages (based on 5% per page coverage per color)
- Will soon launch a 35ppm version (CP4020 for $1099) and a 42ppm version (CP4520 for $1349)
- Hewlett Packard, responding to customer complaints, announced it will offer print drivers for its printers and MFPs so they will work with the new Apple Macintosh Snow Leopard operating system.
- Hewlett Packard claims it now has 5,000 Indigo production color systems in operation worldwide. It will also offer white liquid toner as an option in selected models.
- Hewlett Packard claims that its “Printing Payback Guarantee” promotion (where it guarantees the savings advertised after conducting a managed print services assessment) is a success, and resulted in 100 new contracts within 2 weeks of the promo launch.
- Hewlett Packard’s EDS division announced that it won an $8.1 million bid from the Department of Defense to upgrade their Health Information Management System.
- Hewlett Packard reported its last quarter’s financials for its printer/MFP division, known as IPG:
- consumer hardware units sales down 16%
- LaserJet unit sales down 42%
- Total hardware unit sales down 23%
- Color LaserJet units sales down 41%
- MFP sales down 38%
- Printer supply revenue down 13%
- Indigo page volumes up 16%
- Samsung of Korea captured 23.4% of the market for A4 sized machines in the second quarter of 2009, according to IDC. This makes Samsung the largest maker of devices that print on letter/legal size paper. Details:
- Regained the top position for first time since first quarter of 2006
- In Europe, had 35.1% marketshare for color laser MFPs and 26.9% for b/w MFPs
- Dominated Italy for b/w laser printers was 39.7%
- b/w laser MFPs = 47.7%
- color laser printers = 45.6%
- color laser MFPs = 52.3%
- IDC projects that laser engines will outperform inkjet worldwide
- Samsung plans to produce lineup of high speed, mid-to-large scale industrial printers
- Samsung’s printer/MFP division led by Y.H. Park, Senior VP
- The National Association of Quick Printers (NAQP) has selected Konica Minolta as winner of the 2009 Association Hall of Fame Award. In order to win this award:
- Demonstrated consistent customer service
- Professionalism and integrity
- Quality of products that benefit the industry (print for pay)
- Innovative products that meet current and evolving needs of customers
- Problem solving sales, service and support staff members who consistently exceed the needs and expectations of customers
- Consistently sought to advance the competitiveness of quick and small commercial printer
- “Konica Minolta Business Solutions USA has stepped up in a big way this past year to offer high quality, very competitive digital printing solutions” “Equally important, they have backed their products with first rate service.”
- Oce’ won “Must See ‘Em” awards at the PRINT 09 trade show in Chicago for the Oce’ JetStream production color inkjet system and the Oce’ VarioPrint b/w production LED system.
- Oce’ announced it will relabel a Creo print servce, and call it the Oce’ PRISMAcolorworks” for the Oce’ ColorTream 10000 rollfed production color system. Pricing unannounced.
- Xerox announced it will offer MICR (magnetic image character recognition) toner versions of the Nuvera 200 and 288MX production b/w laser systems for high volume check printing applications.
- Xerox won several awards at the PRINT 09 show:
- “Worth-a-look” for a Xerox iGen4 production color system bundled with a Stora Enso Gallop to produce color packaging
- “Encore Must See Em” for iGen4/Fiery system
- “Worth-a-look” for DocuColor 7002/8002 systems
- “Encore Worth-a-look” for Xerox 700 color system
- “Must See ‘Em” for Xerox 1300 Continuous Feed b/w system
- Must See ‘Em” for Xerox Nuvera 288EA
- “Worth-a-look” for Xerox 490/980 Continuous Feed color systems
- Xerox launched the Continuous Feed 4-over-1 Solution featuring:
- Bundles a Xerox 490 Color Continuous Feed Printer and a Xerox 650 B/W Continuous Feed Printer
- High speed printing of 4 color on one side and b/w on other
- Aimed at the transpromo market for high speed, high volume customer invoice printing
- According to Xerox, already has its first system sold to a large financial services company
- Uses proprietary flash fusing (instead of a heather fuser roller, uses a micro-burst of light to heat and melt toner to paper)
- No fuser oil needed (unlike Xerox DocuColor 8002 or the iGen4)
- Pricing not announced
- Xerox has expanded the options it offers to instruct its print for pay customers on how to sell and market the output from its production color systems. Details:
- Called the “Xerox ProfitAccelerator” solution packages
- Either sold separately, or bundled in with a Xerox production print system
- New options include:
- “Ad Agency Market Guide” to help printshops target ad agencies and design service providers
- “Profiting Through Personalization Kit” demonstrates the features of optional XMPie variable data software with templates
- “PODi (print on demand initiatives) Digital Print Case Studies” is a 5 year collection of best practices using variable data, with examples from 15 different industries
- Xerox announced that its FreeFlow Process Manager system for its production print systems are now compatible with products from Solimar Systems, Inc., including the Rubika, SOLfusion and SOLindexer systems.
- Street pricing seen on the Xerox color wax copier, the ColorQube 9201:
- $20,485.00 selling price
- $0.0055 for b/w prints (and those with a little bit of color)
- $0.0428 for color prints (prints that have some color)
- Excess usage of wax sticks results in customer getting charged for wax sticks consumed
- Former Xerox executive, Chris Bondy, has left to join InfoTrends as Group Director, Cross-Media Workflow Solutions.
- Xerox announced that it sold the third iGen3 production color system to Dialogue Solutoins, a printshop in Kent, England.
- Barclays Capital predicts that Xerox will “make significant share repurchases next year” to boost its stock value.
- Xerox has hired SalesQuest of Andover, MA to provide its copier sales people with “deep dive company profile reports” on Fortune 1000 prospects. The “CRUSH” alerts and reports provide info to build sales pipelines.
- Xerox now shipping version 6.5 of its DocuShare document management solution featuring:
- ability to store more than 50 million documents
- performs complex search queries in under three seconds
- supports sustained imaging of 12 documents per second or over 1 million per day
- Company claims it won bid to supply DocuShare to:
- Chelmsford Public Schools in Massuchusetts
- Niagara Catholic School District in Canada
- University of Peru
- Manteca Unified School District in California
- Google Corp. announced it has purchased an Expresso Book Machine for its headquarters in Mountain View, CA. Details:
- Can manufacture a paperback-bound books inline
- Top speed of 5 minutes per 300 page book
- Made by OnDemand Books, and uses a Xerox MFP as its print engine
- Google will sell the OnDemand books for $8 each
- Okidata now shipping three new desktop A4 b/w MFPs, the MB260mfp, MB280mfp and MB290mfp. Details:
- Actual maker unknown
- 100MHz processor
- 600x600dpi
- MB260mfp & MB280mfp offer GDI printing only
- MF290mfp offers PCL & PostScript print drivers
- MB280mfp and MB290mfp both have a document feeder
- All can copy/scan/fax/print
- MSRPs of $249.99, $299.99 & $399.99
- Ricoh donated a fully loaded Ricoh Aficio PRO C900S production color laser system to the Graphic Communications Department of California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly).
- Ricoh announced it is offering a new external print controller for the PRO C900 production color system, the EFI Fiery QX100.
- Ricoh announced it will offer a print-only version of one of its A3 color laser MFPs. Details:
- Called the Ricoh Aficio SP C821D for base MSRP of $4669
- Top speed of 50ppm color or b/w (SP C820D with 40ppm for $3699 base MSRP)
- 4 tandem OPC drum design
- Optional finishers
- Generic print controller only
- 600x600dpi at top speed, 1200x1200dpi at half speed (laser must draw the image twice)
- 4 bits per pixel
- 1GHz processor
- PCL & PostScript print drivers
- Ricoh announced it won a bid to provide managed print services to Unilever Corp. Details:
- 5 year cost per copy lease
- Covers offices in 29 countries
- Includes printers and MFPs
- For Unilever’s employees that work from home, they will be provided Ricoh Gelsprinter inkjet units
- Unilever makes consumer products like Lipton Ice Tea, Dove soap, Vaseline, etc.
- Ricoh announced that it opened up a new laser print engine plant in Thailand:
- Located in Rayong, which is southeast of Bangkok
- Will start at 8,000 print engines per month
- Maximum capacity of 140,000 print engines per month
- Cost of 690 million baht
- 210 employees
- Kodak announced it has sold three NexPress S3000 production color systems to Lifetouch National School Studios in Chicago, IL. They will be used to produce school yearbooks nationwide.
- MindFireInc., maker of variable data software, announced a new option called “MarketFire”, which will allow printshops to create, track, analyze and improve cross-media marketing campaigns. Pricing unannounced.
- microsite authoring tools
- flexible rules and trigger based events
- prospect centric data view
- analytical dashboard for reporting and tracking
- Mac and PC compatible
- CPS Printing of Carlsbad, CA announced it has invested in Pageflex Storefront web-to-print software to expand its offerings.
- Xante’ of Alabama announced it received a Pantone license for its Ilumina desktop color LED printer, which is actually made by Okidata.
- Agfa of Germany announced the
otrix Modular color inkjet UV production system. Details:- top speed of 6,300 feet per hour
- rollfed system
- can supposedly match 90% of all Pantone colors
- pricing not announced
- In order to attract attention to its large booth at the recent PRINT 09 show in Chicago, Agfa setup full color, cardboard cutouts of people, to make it look like its booth was busy.
- The Illinois Attorney General’s office has agreed to join the FBI into investigating how a school in Belleville, IL ended up being sued by 7 lease companies, when it thought it only had a lease for two copiers from one leasing company. Governor French Academy claims that it leased two copiers from Kevin Welch, and now the lease companies claim it has a total of 14 copiers on lease.
- XMPie won a “Encore Worth-a-look” award at the PRINT 09 show for its uStore 3.5 web to print software solution.
- Epson is suing a company in Portland, OR, named Green Project, which collects old Epson ink cartridges, takes them to China, cracks-off their tops, refills them with ink, and brings them back to the U.S. to sell for less than new Epson cartridges.
- Cartridge World, a business headquartered in Emeryville, CA, announced that its toner and ink cartridge refilling business is up 16.3% in the poor economy. It claims that its store across the U.S. have refilled 9 million cartridges last year.
- At a recent conference of IT executives, a presenter, Robert DeMarzo of Everything Channel, asked for those in the large audience if they planned to upgrade to Microsoft Windows 7 by end of 2010, only one third raised their hands.
- UPS announced that it will launch a new web portal to allow end users to place print orders that are fulfilled by one of its 4,000 UPS Store locations. This will be the largest on-line printing network in the U.S. when up and running. For more info, visit www.theupsstore.com/print
- Adobe reported its last quarter’s financials:
- Revenue of $697 million, down from $887 million last year
- Operating income of $167 million compared with $219 million last year
- Net income of $136 million compared with $191 million last year
- Adobe announced it will acquire Omniture for $1.8 billion. The company makes Web analytics and measurement tools, so it can analyze how Website visitors interact with a site’s content.
- Kyocera announced that it has developed the world’s fastest inkjet printhead. Details:
- Named “KJ4 Series”
- Ejects up to 60,000 dots per second per nozzle
- 2,656 nozzles per head
- Up to 150 million dots ejected per printhead
- 60kHz drive frequency
- Up to 1200x1200dpi
- Printhead width of 4.25”
- unknown what inkjet printer maker will use this printhead
- Kyocera now offering two new desktop A4 b/w laser MFPs. Details:
- FS-1128mfp (base MSRP of $1371) and FS-1028mfp (base MSRP of $1020)
- Both are 30ppm
- FS-1128mfp comes with document feeder
- 1200x1200dpi
- 300 sheet paper capacity standard
- Auto duplex
- Can add two 250 sheet drawers
- PCL & PostScript print drivers
- 667MHz processor
- Punch Graphix of Belgium announced that it has sold five of its Xeikon 8000 production color systems to Strategic Content Imaging, Inc., of Itasca, IL. Details of the 8000:
- Uses LED instead of laser
- Has 8 drums and images both sides of paper at same time (CMYK times two)
- 1200x1200dpi
- 4 bits per pixel
- 244ppm top speed full color
- 8.5 million pages per month max duty cycle
- Handles up to 16point stock
- Rollfed, up to 20.1” wide paper
- Uses PA toner technology
- SCI will use the systems for its digital book printing
- Lexmark announced it will offer an embedded version of FollowMe Printing software from Ringdale Inc. for some of its laser MFPs.
- Toshiba launched the VP-P450 color printer. Details:
- desktop device that prints passports
- laminates after printing
- uses thermal printing technology
- uses the ePassport software
- encodes IC-chips with the passport holder’s biometric data
- pricing not announced
- Polek & Polek of Fairfield, NJ announced that they are now offering generic toner that works in the Toshiba eSTUDIO 523, 603, 723 and 853 b/w MFPs.
- Document Network Technology won a copier bid from Litchfield School District in the Hillsboro, Illinois area. Details:
- Includes 3.2 million b/w copiers per year
- Winning price was $34.476 per year
- 5 year cpc lease
- 30 day cancellation clause
- Kodak announced that it sold $400 million worth of secured notes to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) in exchange for two seats on Kodak’s board of directors. Kodak also agreed to issue KKR warrants to purchase up to 53 million shares. The company also plans on offer $300 million of notes due in 2017 to institutional buyers.
- 5 men in Toronto, Canada were arrested by police after they were found with more than $1 million worth of inkjet and laser cartridges that were stolen from a local Lexmark warehouse. The product was on 32 skids in two separate locations.
- Two local school children, ages 10 and 11, were caught making fake $20 bills on a color copier in Pratt, West Virginia, near Charleston. The U.S. Secret Service let the boys off with a stern warning.
- In a recent study done by Office Products Analyst (OPA), they found that the average cost per page for a desktop b/w laser printer is now $0.025. (based on 5% coverage per page)
- Nukote International, maker of refilled printer cartridges, is suing Office Depot for $217 million for breach of contract.