MFP Weekend Indsutry Notes from 4/26/09

The following is a quick review of copier/MFP industry news from various trade publications.

Hewlett Packard wins a $245 million bid from the California Department of Corrections.
- Won by the EDS division (EDS was acquired last year by HP)
- Length of contract is 4.5 years
- Included MFPs, printers and scanners on MPS agreement
- Document management software

4 executives announced their departures from EDS, now that HP has acquired the company. The following left to pursue other opportunities:
- Mike Koehler
- Bobby Grisham
- Tom Haubenstricker
- Mike Paolucci

SpencerLab, a division of Spencer & Associates Publishing, Ltd. conducted tests on color printing technology to determine the highest quality and accuracy.
- For photographic output, conventional silver halide processing won out over the
Fuji Frontier 570 digital system
- For digital toner based output from high-end systems, the Xerox iGen4 narrowly beat the Hewlett Packard Indigo Press 5500.

Canon launched “eProactive Service” which is advertised as a web-based solution allowing its dealers to communicate with customer’s Canon MFPs, for automatic service call placement and remote monitoring.

Canon, in an effort to grow distribution from loss of IKON and DANKA, announced it will open up new factory direct branches:
- Albany, NY run by Don Foley
- Boston, MA run by Chris Foley
- Harrisburg, PA run by Richard Fleck
- Hartford, CT run by Janet Cain
- Honolulu, HI run by Gerald Shioji
- Jacksonville, FL run by Ken Jones
- Richmond, VA run by John Whitehead
- Sarasota, FL run by Lisa Beebe

Canon announced it has signed a distribution agreement with Agfa, which will market the Canon imagePRESS production color systems to graphic arts community.

After first announcing it was being acquired by IBM, Sun Microsystems instead is being acquired by Oracle Corp. for $7.4 billion.

Ricoh claims that according to Gartner Corp, it sold more MFPs in the U.S. than any other manufacturer.

eCopy announced that is has reached a total of 100 connectors to connect its ScanStation to popular document management programs. This is a far larger offering than any other vendor in its class.

Toshiba’s stock price dropped 6% when reports surfaced stating that the company was planning on raising $5 billion by selling stock, thus diminishing the value of existing shares.

Toshiba president, Atsutoshi Nishida, announced that the company is in talks to buy nuclear fuel rod assemblies from Kazakhstan.

Toshiba’s Director of Product & Solutions Marketing, Joe Contreras, announced that its MFPs will now offer Ringdale FollowMe as an option. This allows end users to send print jobs, and retrieve them from any properly equipped Toshiba MFP, when they authenticate at the device.

Lexmark announced that its revenues fell 20% during last quarter, due to declining sales of printers and MFPs. It also announced that it will close a plant in Juarez, Mexico to reduce costs. This will eliminate 360 jobs.

Lexmark launched its X460 series of desktop A4 b/w laser MFPs offering:
- offers embedded Solutions Framework (eSF)
- requires extra RAM and HDD options
- MyMFP option gives a remote control panel feature to PC
- Can create personal settings and save them to USB
- 7” full color touchscreen LCD control panel
- Base MSRP starts at $999, up to $1679
- 40ppm top print speed
- 35opm top scan speed
- 1200x1200dpi
- 19,200dpi color scan resolution
- 300 sheet standard paper supply
- 50 sheet capacity document feeder
- Auto duplex standard
- NO finishing options
- Letter/legal size only
- Built-in print controller
- USB, 10/100BaseT ports
- 500MHz processor
- 256MB RAM standard (up to 640MB with options)
- Optional 80GB hard drive
- PCL and PostScript print drivers
- Optional fax board
- Three toner cartridge choices (3K, 9K or 15K yield, based on 5% coverage)
- OPC drum yield of 30K pages
- 80K/month maximum duty cycle
- Advertised cost per page of $0.0177 (for toner only)

Oce’ reported a 60% increase in sales for refurbished equipment. It sold 5,000 units in the past 12 months.

The Printing Industries of America stated that the winner of the Sutherland Ink Rub Test was the Oce’ CS650 (a relabeled Konica Minolta bizhub PRO C6501). This tests the durability of postcards made by the MFPs and how they survive the U.S. Postal system.

Oce’ CEO, Rokus Van Iperen announced:
- Frank de Wit & Jan Dix has resigned from the board
- “Oce’ will continue to explore all realistic options to improve economies of scale, without excluding strategic alternatives, if beneficial for Oce’ and all stakeholders.”
- year on year revenue fell 6%
- operating income declined 29%
- 74% of its business is aftermarket supplies and service
- service/supply revenue declined 5.2%
- hardware sales declined 15.9%
- wide format printer sales fell 17.6%
- FM revenue grew 6.4%
- will lay off an additional 250 workers at its Poing, Germany plant

The National Resources Defense Council is pushing the paperless office by stating:
- The U.S. using 3.7 million tons of paper annually
- The average office worker print more than 1,000 pages per month
- 900 million trees are cut down each year for paper
- 40% of the waste in the U.S. is paper
- Record keeping constitutes more than 90% of office activity
- Over 80% of paper that is filed is never referenced again
- Over 45% of the office prints that are discarded, are discarded on the day that they are printed
- 89% of the time that an office worker edits a document on their computer screen, they reference a printed piece of paper

A man in Dublin arrested, thanks to a copier. Joe Sullivan, a bank worker, was caught transferring money illegally into his account, when he accidentally left the evidence of the transfer on the platen glass of a copier he was using.

The U.S. Patent office listed the total number of INKJET patents issued to the industry heavyweights:
- Silverbrook (maker of future Memjet high speed color inkjet printer) = 501
- Seiko Epson = 468
- Canon = 339
- Hewlett Packard = 322
- Brother = 282
- Fuji (provider of equipment to Xerox) = 184
- Samsung = 161
- Xerox = 136
- Kodak = 118
- Lexmark = 113
- Ricoh = 109
- Konica Minolta = 91
- Toshiba = 33



Dell launched the 1235cn and 2145cn desktop A4 color laser MFPs featuring:
- Both are actually made by Samsung of Korea
- 1235cn is actually the Samsung CLX-3175FN
- 2145cn is actually the Samsung CLX-6210FX
- 1235cn has MSRP of $399
- 17ppm b/w and 4ppm color
- Single drum design
- Advertised color toner cost per page of $0.21
- Advertised b/w toner cost per page of $0.045
- 2145cn has MSRP of $749
- 21ppm color or b/w speed
- 4 OPC tandem drum design
- Advertised color toner cost per page of $0.129
- Advertised b/w toner cost per page of $0.027

Sharp launched the MX-B401 b/w laser MFP featuring:
- Part of the “Frontier Series”
- Letter/legal only as it is an A4 design
- 40ppm top speed
- Optional fax board
- 8.5” full color touchscreen LCD control panel
- Base MSRP of $4995
- 35ppm scan speed
- 600x600dpi copy
- 600x600dpi scan
- 1200x1200dpi print
- 600 sheet standard paper supply
- Maximum paper supply of 2100 sheets with options
- 50 sheet document feeder
- Optional internal stapling finisher
- Built-in print/scan controller standard
- 800MHz processor
- 10/100/1000BaseT & USB ports
- 512MB RAM
- 80GB hard drive
- PCL & PostScript print drivers

The poor economy was reason cited for Sharp cancelling the launch of 5 different models in the Frontier A4 series, including print-only color models, and a 50ppm b/w MFP model.