HP’s Edgeline a colourful reinvention of the inkjet
HP’s Edgeline a colourful reinvention of the inkjet
April 20, 2007: Late in 2006 HP invited Image & Data Manager to its San Francisco launch of Edgeline – printing technology set to topple the myth that colour laser printing is faster than laser.
According to HP’s Vice President & General Manager, Edgeline Technologies, “Edgeline contains more pieces of IP in than in some IT company’s property portfolios.”
500 engineers, 250 goals and 5 years in the making, Edgeline is an exciting development for HP. The first models are expected to be shipped to Australia and APAC in late May.
Despite rumours that the two enterprise level models – HP CM8060 and CM8050 – will be sold for around US$20,000, the message at HP’s Beijing APAC press launch last week was that it would only be available through an HP managed print service (MPS). So while it could say that it offered around 30% savings on comparable laser printers, no exact figure could be offered.
The race to dominate Managed Print Services
There appears to be a race amongst major MFP vendors to dominate the market for MPS. It’s not a new concept, but one that has thus far failed to capture the attention of many. Recently FujiXerox announced its managed print services efforts, claiming via an IDC study that printing fleets cost up to three percent of an organisation’s annual turnover. Major benefits promoted here were not reduced costs, but increased visibility of cost.
HP’s focus is on visibility of costs as well as reducing the total number of printers across an organisation, which should pose an interesting cultural change for managers to deal with.
Where HP says it can address cost is at the total infrastructure level. Some of the hidden costs of managing your own print fleet include lost work time when staff attempt to resolve technical problems with printers, lost time waiting for consumables when they run out, and the problem of managing cost accounts. These areas are addressed by the Universal Print Driver and Webjet Admin, designed to help businesses be aware of consumables before they need replacing.
A large component of the MPS strategy is psychological. When workers are not aware of the cost of printing, they tend not to care too much. The MPS model puts the cost up front.
Core technologies of Edgeline
The core technologies that differentiate Edgeline are its poppet valve drum, the densely populated inkjet print heads and HP’s Vivera patented ink.
The drum is coated with vacuum “poppet valves”. After detecting the paper size, the valves suck the paper to the drum which then feeds it past a row of print heads. Minimising the vacuum, heat and energy consumption was a key goal, says Cutler.
The “page-wide printheads” churns through 71 A-size pages per minute. The 4.25" Edgeline Technology printhead uses five silicon printhead chips, each with 2,112 nozzles placed in a staggered configuration. Each printhead prints two colours of ink and has 10,560 nozzles or 5,280 per colour. The print heads have 20 percent redundancy built in.
Besides cutting out generic ink suppliers, the Vivera ink contains a bonding agent – a clear liquid which preps the page for a quick drying result. No more than 4 seconds after it has printed, journalists were able to rub the inked page. It can safely say that this ink is different to its predecessors.
Other features it promoted were the HP Easy Select Control Panel, a 10-inch colour touch-screen, HP AutoNav – an automatic navigation tool to allow users resolve jamming problems if they arise, HP Color Accent which modifies colour to a cost level equal to mono, and the Universal Print Driver - makes printing easy for users by providing one driver and one interface for virtually all networked and direct-connected HP printers.
Cutler emphasised that Edgeline is designed to “scale up”. The CM8060 offers a workload of 20,000 pages per month at 60% mono and 40% colour and would probably support an average of 50 people.