Digital Home Thoughts: HP Unleashes New High-Speed Printing Platform

"Today, HP addressed that need by announcing the fastest family of inkjet printers in the world. Unusually, at volume, these printers should actually be the least expensive. Estimated cost to print from these printers is under $.25 per 4x6” photo, which is approximately $.05, less than what it costs to have prints printed from a development service. Until now, it has generally been more expensive to use a home printer for photo-quality prints. At fourteen seconds per 4x6” photo print, the product is twice as fast as previous generations of printers. This speed improvement also holds for regular text, generally outputting a page at twice the speed and half the cost of the older generation of printers."

DesignTechnica has an article written by Rob Enderle that discusses HP's new printing platform. At a cost of $1.4 billion, this is a big bet that HP is placing. On the surface, it looks like a big win - much faster print speeds (HP's have always been the slowest on the planet), cheaper printing through increased ink conservation, and single-colour cartridges for less expensive. It's about time HP figured out that individual colours are the way to go. All in all, these new printers look good on paper - I'll be interested to see how they perform in real life. $1.4 billion dollars is a lot to live up to.