Inkjet Printers: Work, Rest and Spray
The latest generation of inkjet printers have a lot to offer the reseller. With high-quality output, they are ideal for tailored packages for business clients, says Geof Wheelwright
The inkjet printer market is undergoing drastic changes as it seeks to broaden its appeal in two key directions, both of which offer important opportunities for dealers.
The first of these is a strong move into the business market, where inkjets have traditionally lost out to laser printers, based on the higher speed, better quality print and connectivity of laser printers. But recent inkjet printer products show that inkjet manufacturers want that to change.
They promise to offer resolutions up 1,440dpi, are able to produce photographic-quality images easily and will run happily over networks. These new printers are also happy to run over local area networks and offer the paper capacity, throughput speed and heavy-duty design necessary to make it as office printers in corporate environments. And the need for colour in presentations, reports and even financial documents means that these corporate colour inkjet systems should find ready and willing customers.
For dealers, resellers and Vars, this latest crop of laser printers offers a huge opportunity. First, inkjet printers are cheaper to sell than laser printers, which should mean that dealers will sell more of them (although they will admittedly make less per-unit revenue on sales).
More importantly, however, there is a much broader array of potential add-on and consumable product sales for inkjet printers than there is for laser printers. To start with, you typically have two inkjet cartridges for each unit (one for colour and one for black printing, on which margin is often good). But the colour capability and high resolution
of the latest inkjetprinters means that many more people will also consider buy- ing special coated paper for printing photographic materials on their inkjet than they would on a monochrome laser printer. And that paper, once again, offers attractive margins.
The paramount consideration in most cases, however, is simply that high-quality, colour inkjet printers give dealers a great way to offer solutions they simply could not put together in any other way.
For example, how about a solution that brings together a mid-range Pentium PC, colour inkjet printer, scanner and image-editing software and a product such as Microsoft Office 97 Small Business Edition? The latter includes Word, Excel, Publisher 97 and a host of small business financial tools, which, when used with the hardware, could create a solution for small business customers that want to produce their own in-store signs, flyers and promotional materials.
Or consider the possibilities of a solution that would combine that same specification, except with a digital camera replacing the scanner. If you were able to provide the customer with a good enough digital camera and a regular supply of coated paper, this would be a great package to sell to anyone who produces corporate ID cards. It could even be offered to local shops that wanted to provide an ?instant photo? service without the expense (and size) of having a photo booth.
By now, you are probably beginning to see that the latest inkjet printers do offer a much broader potential for dealers to create solutions for their customers. But who is making these printers?
One highest-profile player to make announcements in this arena is Epson, with its just-released Stylus Color 600 and Stylus Color 800 systems. Epson bills the Stylus Color 600 as ?the world?s first 1,440 dpi colour inkjet printer?. It uses Photoreal colour printing and has an RRP of #280 excluding VAT.
This resolution is promised in both black and white and colour, although with a speed of just four pages per minute (ppm) in colour, 6ppm in monochrome, users have to be willing to wait for the output they get. This machine is aimed primarily at the home and small business market, but still includes a fast PC parallel and Mac serial port as standard.
Meanwhile, the new printer driver it uses includes a video/ digital camera mode which is supposed to automatically select the optimum settings for imported images ? and the printer also complies with the Mac Colorsync 2 and Windows 95 ICM colour matching systems.
Epson has also spent a little money on the software included with the printer, which includes Sierra Print Artist and Adobe Photo, along with a collection of free designs, fonts and images.
If you want a new inkjet colour system to sell to corporate users, however, how about something like the Stylus Color 800? It offers the same 1,440dpi resolution as the Stylus Color 600, but promises to run at up to 8ppm. It sells for #409 excluding VAT, comes with a PC parallel and Mac serial port as standard, and offers Postscript and networking capability as optional extras. The last two options should definitely put it in the running for corporate applications.
Also aimed squarely at the small business market is the Lexmark 2055 Color Jetprinter. It promises 600 x 600dpi printing in colour and black: it has a dual-cartridge design with a black cartridge for true black and colour cartridge for images with more than 16 million shades. Lexmark also promises black printing speeds of up to 5ppm draft and 4ppm letter quality, as well as colour printing speeds of up to 2ppm draft and 1ppm letter quality.
The 2055 also comes with the Lexmark Photo Pak, which com- prises a special colour photo cartridge that is used in place of the black cartridge to print photos with six colours for product brochures, sales proposals and newsletters. The photo cartridge, when printing in tandem with the Lexmark?s standard three-colour cartridge, is supposed to increase image quality by reducing grain and improving colour depth.
Finally, for dealers that sell into the high end of the printing market ? particularly engineers and designers who need large format printing ? there?s a noteworthy inkjet offering from Canon. Known as the BJC-5500 colour bubble jet printer, it offers better paper handling flexibility than other Canon inkjets, including continuous paper feed and multiple paper sources. It is capable of printing media up to A2 in size.
The BJC-5500 promises a monochrome print speed of up to 7ppm and with continuous feed is being positioned by Canon as an ideal replacement for dot-matrix printers. Additionally, by replacing the high-capacity black cartridge with a black/colour cartridge, the BJC-5500 becomes a colour printer with 360 x 360dpi printing in colour mode and up to 720 x 360dpi in black mode.
Canon says the BJC-5500 will support a variety of media including glossy paper, coated paper, transparency, back print film, and high-gloss film. Up to 100 sheets of A4 or A3 paper can also be stacked in the optional auto sheetfeeders for improved paper handling.
This flexibility in both media size and type, allows the user the scope for creating a wide range of output, such as reports, drawings, presentations and images.
The other main area of opportunity lies with those who want to use inkjet systems at home for outputting either scanned images or those taken with digital cameras. Here again, the pace of new announcements has been breathtaking.
Hewlett Packard (HP) has released its Deskjet 694C and Deskjet 692C photo-quality printers. The company is encouraging dealers to sell these as complete photo-quality printing solutions in one convenient and affordable package. These machines replace the existing Deskjet 690C and Deskjet 693C printers.
To further encourage users to make the connection between printers and digital photography, HP is shipping the Deskjet 694C with HP Photo Project CD and an HP sample paper pack.
The HP Photo Project CD contains Storm Technology?s Easy Photo, Corel?s Print House and Printpak?s Awesome Iron-Ons software.
In addition, the Deskjet 694C and the Deskjet 692C include an HP Photo Cartridge for photo-quality printing and a special storage container that is supposed to protect the cartridge when not in use.
To get customers used to the idea of buying premium papers, HP also has included a sample paper pack that provides three sheets of HP Photo Paper for photo printing, one sheet of iron-on transfer paper for creative fabric designs and five sheets of HP Greeting Card Paper with matching envelopes for cards and invitations.
Epson is also not getting left out of this new push on printers for instant photo solutions in the consumer market. In January, it also launched the Stylus Color 400 inkjet printer with print speeds of up to 4ppm in mono and 3ppm in colour. As with the company?s higher-end inkjet systems, it uses built- in Photoreal 720dpi plain paper printing with new Quick-Dry inks to produce a better photographic image.
Selling for an RRP (excluding VAT) of #217, it is definitely priced to move in on the consumer market, making it pretty unique among the 720dpi four-colour machines. Epson says the Stylus Colour 400 is aimed at the home user and is ideal for producing homework, correspondence, greeting cards, T-shirt transfers, party invitations, flyers and newsletters.
In short, inkjet printers now seem to be a reasonable match for both corporate PC solutions that you might want to put together for your customers. And, when matched with either colour scanners or one of the dozens of new, lower-priced digital cameras, could be a great instant photography solution to sell to both consumers and businesses.
The key would seem to be in spotting the opportunity to create solutions that could really serve vertical markets well. You could, for example, put together a package including a low-cost PC with a digital camera and one of these new high-resolution inkjet printers as a solution for estate agents.
Instead of having to take snapshots and pay to get them processed, estate agents could simply take all the pictures of their new listings, design a listing brochure for each new property and print it out on the inkjet printer. The quality of the end product would be far higher, but the cost would actually be lower.
These kinds of solutions are likely to go a long way for dealers that want to make the most of their opportunity and find a niche at a time when they all seem to be filling up too quickly.