Cartridge Blog

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has announced it will resume production of consumer tablets but says it will run them on Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system.

The world’s largest technology firm suspended its touchPad WebOS tablet production line last year on poor sales.

Restarting production is a strategic move aimed at capitalising on the extraordinary growth in tablet sales, chief executive Meg Whitman said yesterday at the Global Influencer Summit 2012.

The California-based firm also plans to merge its printing and PC computer businesses.

The consolidation will take place among Southeast Asian’s operating units within the next three months.

Ms Whitman said the merger, with a combined business value of US$65 billion, will improve HP’s business efficiency by centralising sales and marketing teams, unifying products and reducing logistics costs.

Todd Bradley, the executive vice-president for printing and personal systems, said HP’s Windows 8 tablets will come equipped with cloud-based technology, enabling users to share and store content online between different devices.

He also said ultrabooks will be a key product aimed at both consumers and businesses this year.

HP has introduced the Envy, a sleek-design ultrabook aimed at the mass market and priced from $700-800.

The company will also offer a premium Envy priced at $999.

HP is searching for an Asia-Pacific location to build a $100-million printer factory, with Thailand considered an option.

Mr Bradley said Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam are the top three high-growth markets in Asean, as these countries still have low PC penetration rates.

Bryan Ma, an associate vice-president at the global research firm IDC, said Asean’s PC exports are expected to grow by 9% to 19 million units this year.

Bangkokpost PCmag

Authorities in the UAE has seized more than one million counterfeit printing products and components since last year, following co-ordination with HP.

The vendor has worked with law enforcement authorities in a number of actions against suppliers of fake items in the past year.

In one action alone in February, police raided several interconnected companies in Dubai, seizing 320,000 counterfeit flat boxes, more than 35,000 finished fake print cartridges, over 24,000 empty laser print cartridges and 20,000 counterfeit laser security labels. Four people were arrested in connection with the raid.

“HP appreciates the cooperation of the Dubai Police and its continued prosecution of counterfeiters who try to defraud innocent customers,” said Amin Mortazavi, general manager, Imaging and Printing Group, HP Middle East. “We look forward to further collaborations to eliminate fake products to ensure that people receive genuine products of original quality and reliability.”

In the EMEA region in the past four years, HP’s anti-counterfeit program has conducted nearly 1,000 investigations which have resulted in over 600 enforcement actions and the seizure of nearly 8 million counterfeit products and components.

A team of German scientists have developed the world’s first printable speaker, which will be displayed at the drupa tradeshow this month.

The Local.de reports that scientists at the Institute for Print and Media Technology at Chemnitz University of Technology have developed the printable speakers through the process of “printing layers of polymers and conductive chemicals onto a single piece of paper”. The speakers were also presented to visitors at the drupa show in Dusseldorf last month.

The team had been working on the project for two and a half years before making a successful prototype, and the finished product could become a “viable, cheaper alternative” to normal speakers as “polymers are cheap to make in big batches”. The only downside so far is that the speakers lack the ability to project deep bass sounds, though this is being worked on.

The speakers are highly flexible, and each is even able to “produce a better sound when it is being bent”, according to the researchers. The concept of “intelligent packaging”, whereby the paper could be used in a commercial sense, has also been mooted as a possible venture for the technology.

Project member Dr. Georg Schmidt described how the system works: “A cable is used to run music from a computer or MP3 player, which causes the printed layers to vibrate against each other and push the sound out.

“As soon as we had them working we used them to listen to the radio all the time in our office. They can create sound up to 80 decibels, so more than loud enough to hear inside.”

Brother has unveiled the fastest printer in the world, spitting out pages at 100 per minute. Presented as a perfect middle ground between inkjet and laser printing, it’s primarily intended for corporate use.

Nobody has the slightest inkling what it’s called, how much it will cost, or when it will be released. But we did see it—and film it—at work. Yes, it really does exist.

It’s official, 100 pages per minute is now the fastest printing speed on the market. The technology is based on a single 21.5 cm-wide print head with no fewer than 5,198 nozzles.

The mysterious printer performs somewhat like a departmental printer. A multitude of trays can be added for different paper types in order to produce the quantities needed for massive printing jobs. It is capable of simultaneous double-sided printing and the print head is stationary.

Brother claims that it halves both printing costs and the machine’s carbon footprint. As we wait for further information, here’s the video we took at the presentation in Berlin.

Digital Versus

LAKE SUCCESS, N.Y. – Canon U.S.A. Inc. announced that the PIXMA MG8220 and MG6220 Wireless Photo All-In-One (AIO) inkjet photo printers now support Google Cloud Print allowing users to print from Gmail and Google Docs on a mobile device and from the Google Chrome browser for Mac, Windows, Linux and Chrome devices. With Google Cloud Print, you can print from wherever you are, from applications you use every day. You can even share your home and work printers with anyone you choose. The PIXMA MX892 Wireless Office AIO inkjet printer is also scheduled to provide the same support in May.

“We are excited to work with Google on the addition of this connectivity feature on our PIXMA printers,” said Yuichi Ishizuka, executive vice president and general manager, Imaging Technologies & Communications Group, Canon U.S.A. “In today’s world, we understand that consumers are always interested in additional connectivity options to print their important photos and documents and we are more than happy to be able to deliver this new feature to our users today.”

“We designed the Google Cloud Print service to make it easy to print to a home or work printer directly from any app or device that you use every day,” said Mike Jazayeri, product management director at Google. “It’s exciting to see that the latest range of Canon printers are Google Cloud Print ready, offering people a seamless printing experience.”

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Toner Recycling (TRC), which operates cartridge collection services for Ricoh, Canon, Brother, Konica Minolta, and Sharp, has announced the implementation of waste toner into paint suitable for applications including buildings, fences and covering graffiti, reports Waste Management World.

The collection company aimed to find a commercially viable way of making use of the waste toner from cartridges collected, noting that despite the plastic and metal components of toner cartridges being easily recyclable, TRC generated enough waste toner to fill 1,000 litre bottles on a monthly basis.

Another New Zealand company, Enviropaints, discovered that the toner is polymer-based and therefore suitable for use in paints and, following a six-month trial, created what is believed to be the first re-created specialist outdoor commercial paint.

Wayne Grieve, General Manager, TRC, commented: “Finding a path for the waste toner was the missing piece of the jigsaw […] We don’t put ourselves up as a ‘zero to landfill’ recycler, but what goes in is less than half of one percent.

“It has been fantastic to work with Enviropaints, which has the technical expertise and vision to think outside the square and produce quality paints incorporating all kinds of materials which would otherwise go to landfill.”

Peter Reid, General Manager, Enviropaints, added: “This is an exciting innovation. It wasn’t an easy process to perfect, so it was a matter of coming up with the secret formula using our innovative technology to achieve the right results.

“We are able to use the various toner colours to their maximum advantage, and have achieved our goal of creating a new-life paint through innovation. This, of course, has definite cost savings on our raw materials, resulting in a sharper price to the end user without affecting the quality.”

Reid also remarked that Enviropaints is “well down the road” to implementing toner usage into other areas.

The Recycler

72 variants of LaserJet printers are at potential risk of unauthorised access.

Hewlett-Packard on Friday issued an urgent support notification to registered HP LaserJet printer owners warning of a vulnerability that could allow hackers unauthorized access to 50 product lines.

HP said in an email viewed by PCMag that no reports have been made of the affected printers being accessed through the vulnerability, but pointed owners of LaserJet-branded printers to a list of affected products and instructions for fixing the bug on its tech support site.

The company didn’t offer a lot of details about the vulnerability, which makes it possible to remotely install unauthorized printer firmware on the affected LaserJet products “on a public Internet without a firewall, or for LaserJet devices in a private network, if a malicious effort is made by a party on the private network to modify the firmware of the device.”

Some of the affected LaserJet products require a firmware update that implements code signing to verify that firmware updates are properly signed and not malicious, while other devices on the list do not appear to require this step.

All of the devices should have their Remote Firmware Update capability disabled, though for some LaserJet products, this appears to require yet another separate firmware update HP is providing that allows the function to be turned off.

LaserJet owners should probably check out HP’s list of affected printers and security bulletin, and if the process of applying the fix proves too complicated, get HP tech support on the horn and/or email them at Hewlett-Packard@urgentsupport.americas.hp.com.

Source PCMag

According to a Forbes article, Toni Sacconaghi states his belief that “the business is ultimately likely to be shut down” and lowering the stock target to $38.

Bernstein Research analyst toni Sacconaghi commented on the future of Lexmark, remarking that “[we] believe the [printer] business is ultimately likely to be shut down” following reducing his rating of the OEM from Outperform to Market Perform.

Sacconaghi cut his stock target of Lexmark from $46 (€34) to $38 (€28). The OEM closed at $34.28 (€25.68) on the 23 March.

The analyst makes comment in his research notes that “material stock outperformance appears unlikely in the face of flat to declining revenues over the next few years, fears about longer term secular pressures and the company’s history of inconsistent financial performance and associated stock volatility.

“We remain unconvinced that Lexmark can regain traction in inkjet, and believe the business is ultimately unlikely to be shut down, incurring a further cash drain in the company and some de-scaling risk.”

Sacconaghi concludes that “Lexmark’s laser business, while healthy, is unlikely to sustain the pace of recent share gains and could see slower revenue growth going forward.”

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LAKE SUCCESS, N.Y. – Canon U.S.A. Inc. announced its parent company, Canon Inc., was granted 2,813 new U.S. patents during the 2011 calendar year, surpassing the company record of 2,543 new patents in 2010. Based on weekly patent counts issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for 2011, Canon Inc. placed third overall, marking a new milestone in the company’s history as one of the top five patent holders worldwide for more than a quarter of a century.

“Maintaining a solid dedication to research and development enables us to maximize efficiency, increase precision and ensure a diversified lineup of future products that will continue to solidify our brand,” said Seymour Liebman, executive vice president, chief administrative officer and general counsel, Canon U.S.A. “2011 was a year we overcame numerous challenges; yet our commitment to research and development enabled us to set new records.”

Patents granted in 2011 continue to drive innovation for Canon Inc. well into the future. To date, Canon Inc. has created core product technologies in fields such as image capture, electrophotography, inkjet printing, lithography and display as well as common platform technologies including digital processing, production engineering, quality management and environmental technologies.

In addition to strengthening and expanding existing businesses, Canon Inc. is committed to the future with a focus on promoting research and development in areas such as medical imaging, intelligent manufacturing and mixed reality. Achieving new advancements throughout a variety of technologies helps to produce a wide range of synergies between products, delivering new value and solutions to customers.

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STAMFORD, Conn., March 12, 2012—      The reign of the personal computer as the sole corporate access device is coming to a close, and by 2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer at the center of users’ digital lives, according to Gartner, Inc.

Gartner analysts said the personal cloud will begin a new era that will provide users with a new level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities, while leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity. However, it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users.

“Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices,” said Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner. “Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”

The past two years have been a whirlwind in the client computing space, leaving many enterprises asking what comes next and what the environment will look like in five years.

“Many call this era the post-PC era, but it isn’t really about being ‘after’ the PC, but rather about a new style of personal computing that frees individuals to use computing in fundamentally new ways to improve multiple aspects of their work and personal lives,” Mr. Kleynhans said.

Several driving forces are combining to create this new era. These megatrends have roots that extend back through the past decade but are aligning in a new way.

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