|
|
 |
Asia-Pacific, 21 June 2004
The 1980s were the days of impact printers, with the office environment characterised by the noisy symphony of typewriters, daisywheels, dot-matrix printers and where printing output was ragged, messy and inefficient. Although laser printers provided a quality alternative, with a price starting at US$100,000, the technology was simply too prohibitive.
Although previously known for its scientific instruments and calculators, HP saw the glimmer of a new commercial market and realised the potential to apply their inventive spirit to address the industry shortcoming. Rather than take on the impact printing giants, the company made a bold bid to change the print game, investing heavily in two promising new technologies: laser and inkjet.
Significantly, HP decided to adopt the emerging PC business model for both of these new print technologies and make these new printers compatible with most PCs, setting the standard for the PC print market that would follow.
HP ThinkJet
The seeds of the inkjet project were sown at HP's Palo Alto Labs in 1979, where a team working on thin-film technology developed the idea of a thermal inkjet mechanism that showed some promise for miniaturisation and mass-production
By April 1984, the ThinkJet made its debut, weighing less than six pounds and priced at US$495. It was a small, quiet, low-priced printer that could nimbly generate 150 characters per second and be used with either desktop or portable computers made by HP or other manufacturers. HP’s print head and ink reservoir were packaged together in an inexpensive disposable unit, with the added feature of a cartridge-swapping system of either black, red, green or blue, a first-pass at the color print systems to come.
But this early model also had its weaknesses and due to an absence of paper standards for inkjet technology, the ThinkJet required special paper, ensuring that the little printer that could was well received, but languished in a specialty market. Breaking through Due to their price and adequate performance, dot-matrix printers continued to dominate, however HP had big plans for inkjet technology – plans that would soon consign the noisy impact printers to the pages of history.
When contemplating PaintJet technology in 1987, HP listened to customer’s feedback, realising that they were extremely interested in printers that could print color in addition to black. So HP adopted color as a feature. Priced at US$1,395, the first PaintJet sported a new standard CYMK — cyan, yellow and magenta on one cartridge and a separate cartridge for true black.
In 1991, a mere seven years after entering the market, HP had taken on and was soundly trouncing the competition. An industry insider at the time noted that if you wanted an inkjet product, you had your choice: HP, HP or HP.
HP LaserJet
In the 1970s, laser was the superior printing technology, with the first laser printers producing fast and high quality print. They were however large and prohibitively expensive, which limited accessibility to very large companies.
By the early 1980s, consumers were demanding faster, quieter printers with more consistent print quality, more typefaces, more symbols and characters on a page. It was in this environment that the HP LaserJet printer was born. A matched set In 1983, HP decided to partner with Canon, who had already developed a marking engine — the basic mechanism that performs the physical imaging and paper handling of a printer. This enabled HP engineers to concentrate on the controller electronics and print control language.
The most distinctive innovation of HP's resulting LaserJet was the remarkable 'all-in-one' cartridge. This was a breakthrough in reliability as it eliminated complex trouble shooting when print began to degrade.
Unlike any other
When the HP LaserJet was introduced in 1984, it became the first printer to address the requirements customers increasingly wanted: speed, reliability, flexibility, high-quality printing, a small footprint, affordability and an upgradeable printer command architecture ensuring broad support from PC software applications.
Initially, the US$3,495 price was affordable for smaller businesses. Its output was eight pages per minute, and it was designed to operate with both HP equipment and a variety of IBM-PC compatibles. The LaserJet created a new mainstream office printer market and immediately attracted high praise from the industry and customers alike.
Its success broke the computer system paradigm — in which computers and printers were purchased as part of an integrated, high-end package focused on direct sales to the large end user — and began tracking with the new, more democratic PC business through reseller distribution channels. With each LaserJet revision offering greater capability at lower prices than its predecessor, this original LaserJet was on the path to becoming HP's most successful single product ever.
With the introduction of the LaserJet IIP in 1989, HP delivered the first 'personal' LaserJet. At less than $1000, the IIP was half the size of previous products but it still had all the print quality, reliability, paper-handling, font and graphics capabilities of its predecessors.
Today, both HP’s inkjet and LaserJet printers continue to dominate the world market. By April 2004, HP had shipped 228 million inkjet printers and remains the worldwide market leader in inkjet printing. In 2003, the company marked the shipment of its 75 millionth LaserJet printer. These market changing products are the result of HP’s ability to integrate product development and the needs of its customers.
Specifically, the genesis of HP's inkjet and LaserJet printers is the story of how a pair of remarkable printers helped HP write the history of a second revolution in print — one that placed the power of print directly in the hands of a waiting world.
|
|
Printable version
