Your next printer: a `Jack-of-all-trades'?

Why buy a plain old printer, when you can get a machine that also copies, scans, faxes — and even emails? Anand Parthasarathy examines if the new generation multi-function printers that are hitting the Indian market are a good dea l.

WHEN THEY first appeared about five years ago they were pricey options that the industry dubbed `Swiss Army Knife' printers. Like the legendary `hiker's friend' with a blade for every conceivable emergency, these new printers were imaging Jack-of-all trades: they were basically printing peripherals for the PC — but they also doubled as a copier, a facsimile machine or a document scanner.

The hitch was — you ended up paying almost the same as buying three or four standalone machines. The savings were marginal and the idea of putting all one's office tools in one basket, so to speak, didn't appeal to too many customers.

According to a recent Gartner- Dataquest global survey, sales of all-in-ones - or multi-function printers (MFPs) as they are now known — grew by 98 per cent in the first quarter of 2002 as compared to a year ago. And to everyone's surprise, the acceptance has come not just from the office segment of the market but from home PC owners as well. Which is why, an Indian consumer is being bombarded these days by print media announcements of affordable MFP options from some of the first players in this emerging niche.

On September 17, Hewlett Packard launched a number of new laser-based MFPs with entry-level prices around Rs. 36,000 (for the model 3300 MFP) and with two other models, the 4100 and 9000,for the office segment, with a direct `documents end' (email) capability.

Less than a month ago, the same company had unveiled a full line up of all-in-one inkjet-based colour printers.

These included the PSC 2110, the 2220 and the entry-level Officejetv40, which brought down the price of MFP technology to around Rs15,000. HP's Country Manager, Imaging and Printing, Mr Nitin Hiranandani sees the MFP arena as uncharted territory: there has been no clear market leader in India so far and the field is wide open for a printer leader to try and repeat its showing. September also saw Canon India conduct a countrywide road show to showcase its digital imaging line up — including the company's globally launched Smart Office option, which says in essence: `Why not look at a single solution for all your imaging needs, a machine that captures, prints, reproduces, sends and manages your document and visual data'. The MPC600F, a bubble-jet based machine for example, prints at photo quality; black-and-white copies, scans at 9600 dots per inch and faxes at 3 seconds a page.

Entry-level machines in this category come at around Rs 18,000. Canon has another series the `Image Runner', which addresses the office laser-based market. Here its machines go beyond the four basic functions and enable a user to capture an image, integrate into a document, save it as an acrobat file and email it directly from the machine-all with the minimum number of key strokes.

Mr Lakshmi Narayan Rao, Canon's Marketing Manager, Value Products, likens these new machines to a `document communication conduit' - a single seamless pipe from source to target.

The other name in the printer business which has addressed an MFP range in India this month is Samsung, who has launched both a colour ink jet flatbed multifunction machine — the SCX 1150F — as well as laser-based SF 5100P model. This sudden surfeit of multifunction goodies means a variety of Indian customers can now seriously consider buying a machine which does three or more imaging tasks: For the home user, Rs.15,000 - Rs 20,000 will buy a colour inkjet based MFP. For the small office, Rs. 35,000 - Rs 3 lakhs is enough to install a single point office image and document handling resource.

And for the large enterprise-type of outfit, or one, which needs to take the application to offset printing level, a good quality collaborative MFP can be had for Rs. 4 - Rs 40 lakhs. If it seems somehow confusing why the same basic 4 functions should be available in such a wide price range, a visit to the website: www.mfpa.org might be useful to gain some insight. The main pitch of Multi Function Product Association (MFPA) is that it saves costs on multiple devices.

But these days an equally strong argument is that the biggest saving is time — for moving a digital file from device to device, when all of them are essentially harnessing the same technology.

Just think about it — the laser printer, dry copier and scanner all use a tiny laser to scan the contents of a document — so why pay for this redundancy? There are some other interesting findings in the Gartner Group survey: Typical print jobs are for five or less pages — average copying tasks are for 7.5 copies. Of the jobs brought to a copier, about 70 per cent of the originals came from a printer. Hence there is room for a machine, which is capable of doing a large number of small jobs and a printer-copier, is the ideal combo. The scan and fax options are essentially icing on this basic print-copy cake.

Nobody faxes these days, when you can email at a fraction of the cost; but a scanner is increasingly useful, because of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that is always thrown in free.

In short the industry guys are telling us: MFPs bring together functions that are `made for each other'.

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu