The year that was saw printer resolution and speed doubling. The year that is will see technology move in a different direction, with Bluetooth expected to make a splash on the peripherals scene, predict Prashant L Rao & Akhtar Pasha

Technology innovation in peripherals can come about in terms of hardware modifications, improved electronics or better software. In the consumer space you can add better design aesthetics to that list. V Krishnan, general manager for marketing (IPG) at Hewlett Packard India says, “New technology makes sense only when it creates a significant impact on business.” Technology can help improve product functionality, offer greater convenience by merging features, save on cost, or offer better RoI and by providing aspirational value to consumers.

Laser printers
Four years back, HP’s laser printers delivered four pages per minute (PPM). Today, they can print 32 PPM. The output quality of monochrome lasers has gone up to 1,200 dots per inch (dpi). Laser printers have become network-enabled; a printer is now a shared resource, and, as a result, issues such as bandwidth, print speed and security have become important. The aim is to satisfy many users without choking the LAN.

Remote management of printers is a key issue in organisations that have 10 or more printers. Diagnostics predict which printer is likely to fail and rectify the fault or send an alert over the LAN to the system administration. A printer with 90 percent of its toner depleted can alert you to change the cartridge before you queue up a heavy job.

Technology now lets you take 10 pages, keep them in the printer’s memory, and make 10 copies, saving network bandwidth in the process by not having to transmit the print job 10 times over. Today, high-end laser printers are shipped with disk drives and enough intelligence to make multiple copies, collate and staple them. “We have taken technology out of photocopy machines and put it in laser printers,” says Krishnan.

HP’s not the only vendor assimilating ideas from photocopying. Canon’s ImageRunner series of multi-function devices are built to be document handlers that copy, scan, print and fax on a network.

Security: Access rights can be granted on a per user basis to print jobs on a specific printer. An access code can be used to password protect a print job so that the owner of the job has to go to the printer and type in a code before the job prints. This is called private printing, and in a networked environment it is crucial if you want to secure information that should be kept confidential. In the legal and financial world it is important to differentiate between an original document and its copies. Current technology allows you to print only one original; from the second copy onwards, all are watermarked copy #x.

Accounting: Until last year, this wasn’t available. Now printers can track usage and even bill various departments according to usage.

Colour lasers: Two years ago, most colour printers used to work like offset printers, and print cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) one after another in four stages. This took four times the normal time. With current technology, a single stage is all that’s required as the paper flows over four drums using what HP calls an ‘Inline paper path’. Through this, speed increases by a factor of four. Another benefit of the new technology is that colour lasers that used to be huge are now 1/5th to 1/8th their former size; they also consume less power and offer higher resolution.

When printing colour images, software has to convert the red-green-blue (RGB) screen to a CMYK raster. This raster image processing (RIP) software used to run on the PC, hogging resources. By pushing RIP processing onto the printer, where low-level optimised code does the job, the PC is freed up.

Toner: Today, MICR-recognisable toner power is available, making it possible to print cheque-books on a laser printer. Citibank uses this technology.

Bill printing: Huge DMPs printing on pre-printed stationery traditionally dominated this area. This work is now shifting to lasers, since providers also want to use a bill as a promotional marketing tool. Some space on the printout is set aside for a message from the provider in what is called ‘variable data printing.’ Here the ‘variable’ text is readied and pre-programmed into the printer along with information regarding its placement on the final page. Data is pulled out of the main database and the printer composes the sheet with the variable content.

Another aspect is the huge volumes involved in bill printing. A provider may print 10,000 bills in one cycle. This can be done using one huge printer, or it can be split over many printers. Large companies traditionally have one printing shop and mail bills from a centralised location, but this can lead to a single point of failure. By splitting the job and farming it off to multiple locations or several printers in a single complex, and using remote printing technology called ‘cluster printing,’ companies can reduce the impact of a printer failing.

Inkjets
According to Suresh G, product manager at Epson India, “Inkjet speed has gone up at the entry-level from 6 PPM last year to 12 PPM this year. Similarly, resolution has gone up from 600-720 dpi to 1,440 dpi at the entry-level. At the high-end, inkjet speeds have gone up to 22 PPM, while resolution is a maximum of 5,760 dpi.”

Serial and parallel connections have given way to USB. Another innovation like ‘optimised printing’ from HP takes advantage of software that differentiates between text and graphics, and prints both at the highest possible speed. Without such software, printers tend to print a mix of text and graphics at graphics speed, which is much slower than the speed at which text is printed.

HP’s PhotoRET technology has gone through four generations. The aim is to put as many dots of different colours as
possible onto the paper without making it soggy. The next challenge is to put as many ink drops as possible in a single dot. In PhotoRET II, you could put two ink drops on a single dot. In PhotoRET IV you can put 32 drops on a dot. In technical terms, in PhotoRET II each drop was 32 picolitres. Today, in PhotoRET IV, each drop is just 4 picolitres. In Epson’s case, droplet size has reduced to 6 picolitres, with a minimum drop size of 3 picolitres in the company’s mid-range printer models.

This reflects the changing usage of inkjets as well. Previously, they were used predominantly for text and simple business graphics such as charts and graphs. Today, inkjet printing is moving towards photographic output. Photo printers in the last one year print extra colours for realistic skin tones. Earlier, you had separate tanks for black and the other (CMY) colours. In a photo printer, you replace the black cartridge with another colour cartridge (light cyan and light magenta). This gives the printer five inks plus black that can be composed in up to 48-bit colour. Epson has introduced a seven-colour large format inkjet printer (the colours in addition to CMYK are light cyan, light magenta and matt black).

Photo printing
Photo printing has been a major trend in 2002. Inkjet vendors focused on delivering innovative applications for this niche. “The Stylus Photo 925 lets you click a passport photo on a digicam and print it on the fly; the printer takes care of re-sizing the photo. Earlier, you needed Rs 1 lakh to set up a mobile passport studio; with this product, the cost has dropped to less than Rs 50,000,” says Suresh. Epson’s photo printers sport features like a built-in autocutter that does away with the need for a separate mechanism. Longevity of prints is another feature; Epson asserts that prints on special paper last up to 200 years.

Canon has Drop Modulation, or varying droplet size which lets Canon printers produce shades closer to the original. This combined with Canon’s special inks deliver better picture quality and fade resistance.

Consumables
Compared to the situation five years back, there have been improvements in cost per page, which has now been brought within striking distance of photocopy machines. In inkjets, Canon has what it calls Think Tank. Folks with Canon printers only need to replace individual ink tanks and not the entire cartridge if a particular colour runs out.

Scanners
In scanners, resolution is up to 2,400 dpi (It used to vary from 600 to 1,200 dpi in the past). By using software-enhanced resolution you can go up to 9,000 dpi. One innovation is to scan and store the result as a PDF that cannot be tampered with. Automatic document feeders speed up scanning. Earlier you could only scan photos, but today you can scan negatives and transparencies as well. While scanning several photos it is important that they should not get scratched. To achieve this, HP scanners now use an air-cushion that keeps the photo from touching the scanner’s glass surface. Canon has printers that scan—replacing the cartridge turns the printer into a scanner.

Convergence
n All-in-ones: Two technologies are married to create a product with richer functionality. All-in-ones sport inkjet or LaserJet engines, scanner glass on top of the engine, and a modem or LAN card to make them shareable. These devices can e-mail scanned documents directly, or scan and print on another printer at a particular IP address. Even a non-HP printer at the other end can receive a scan.

Future directions

• Bluetooth: “Once the price drops, every device will be Bluetooth-enabled,” says Krishnan. “Infrared is cumbersome. Bluetooth with its range of 100 feet is ideal.” Suresh concurs, “We expect Bluetooth in photo printers.”
• Internet-enabled printers: These will let you print anywhere.
• Colour will become more affordable: While colour makes the pitch stand out, high costs have kept people from making full use of it. Today, the majority of colour printing is on inkjets. The next step is colour laser printing.
• Application-driven high-end printing: Today, if you fill a bank form, it is sent in a batch to a local office where it is keyed into a database and then processed, a credit check is done, and a letter is sent to you. By integrating the application with the scanning and printing mechanism you can scan the same form on your scanner and give an IP address to which the data is sent; it is processed at this address and the information is sent back to you. Citibank is trying to do this. The trend is towards a printer/scanner with intelligence that doesn’t require a PC.
• Stand-alone and portable: There will be more printers with stand-alone printing capability. Expect to see highly portable printers that can be carried around with a digicam.

2003 will see printing speed go up as usual, while running costs are expected to drop, which in turn should give a boost to colour usage. Resolution, however, is expected to stay put.