More than 3m Brits now officially work from home, and millions more are catching up with office tasks at home in the evenings or at the weekends. The idea of doing your job without leaving your house (or even your pyjamas) might be tempting, but to get really productive without getting dressed you’ll need to partner your computer with a printer, a photocopier and maybe even a scanner.

An easy way to do this without turning your spare bedroom into a branch office is with an all-in-one (AIO) printer. This multifunctional desktop device can print business letters and colour pictures, photocopy paperwork and scan all kinds of documents for digital storage.

What’s more, it’s compact, has just one mains plug and in most cases connects to your PC with a single USB cable. Annoyingly, you’ll need to buy the cable (costing from £3) separately for every printer on test here, except for the Lexmark X4550, which transmits data wirelessly over your wi-fi network, so you can really clear up your desk by hiding it away in a cupboard. The Brother can also work wirelessly if plugged into a wi-fi router.

All the printers on test except the Lexmark X2550 have memory-card slots and a PictBridge port for printing photos directly from your digital camera. A few AIOs (such as the Brother) can also work as a fax machine, but these tend to be pricier, and faxing isn’t popular nowadays.

At the heart of every AIO is an inkjet printer, a technological marvel that uses thousands of tiny nozzles to deliver microscopic amounts of ink with incredible precision, hundreds of times a second. The number of coloured inks is important; all the printers in our test used four, but more sophisticated photo printers can use up to eight inks for richer, more realistic colours. The Lexmarks can add two extra inks but the Canon and HP produced decent photos with their standard four.

You’ll end up spending much more on ink over the lifetime of a printer than you ever did on buying it. Except where noted, these printers use about 5p worth of ink to print or photocopy a typical page comprising black text and colour images. But if you print mostly ink-hungry photos, be prepared for rocketing running costs.

Shop around for replacement inks, as online stores often charge far less than high street shops do. Think carefully before using cartridges that aren’t from the printer’s maker, or ink-refill packs; these do save you money, but at the risk of patchy ink coverage and smeary or fading prints.

When it comes to scanning, all the AIOs here were fine for making digital back-ups of letters and passports. But if you want to digitise photos to enlarge later, you’ll ideally need a resolution of 2,400 x 4,800dpi, which only the Canon and HP could offer. While all the AIOs tested could produce readable (if not necessarily beautiful) photocopies of documents, none is suitable for bulk copying or making pristine reproductions of photos. Nevertheless, all-in-ones are a very handy home-office addition for weekend workers.

Source:technology.timesonline.co.uk

HP India has expanded its laser printer portfolio with the launch of two mono lasers, HP LaserJet P1505 and HP LaserJet P1505N, and two multifunction lasers, HP LaserJet M2727nf and HP LaserJet M2727nfs. Targeted at small and medium businesses (SMBs) and enterprises, the price range starts from Rs. 9, 999/- to Rs. 55,000/-.

The roll out is part of HP's Print 2.0 strategy, an overall strategy designed to accelerate the company's ability to capture a significant portion of the 53 trillion pages expected to be printed by 2010.

"We believe in growing, expanding and leading the laser printer market in India. HP is optimistic about the robust economic growth in India and expects this to fuel business demand for its Laser Jet printers," said Samir Shah, Director - Commercial and Enterprise Printing, Imaging and Printing Group, HP India Sales Pvt. Ltd.

"Through HP's Print 2.0 strategy, we are providing SMBs and enterprises in the country with the most comprehensive set of printing hardware, services, solutions and tools that make it easier and more affordable for the segment to create, consume, manage and print business content in the way they want; whether in-house, online, in retail or through a print service," added Shah.

The HP LaserJet P1505 and HP LaserJet P1505N are amongst the first mono laser printers in its class to exceed the speed of 20 ppm. The printers deliver a print speed of 23 ppm and a first-page-out time of 6.5 seconds with HP Instant On technology. HP said the low-end laser printers provide customers with manageability features usually found in high-end LaserJet devices.

These network-enabled printers feature intelligence built into the toner cartridge that provides alerts when the toner is low and can issue daily printer usage data. The new chemically prepared toner used in the range produces bold, crisp text and sharper images at fast speeds. The HP LaserJet P1505 is priced at Rs. 9999/-, while the HP LaserJet P1505n, which is also adapted to the Linux platform, is priced at Rs.14,999/-.

The HP LaserJet M2727 NF and HP LaserJet M2727 NFS, ideal for SMBs and enterprises with unmanaged IT environments, are full-featured multifunction printers with built-in networking, duplex printing, network ready scanning/ faxing and a print speed of 27 ppm. HP's Instant On technology helps boosts productivity by delivering the first page in 8.5 seconds from PowerSave mode. HP's Instant On Copy technology means no more wasted time waiting for the copier to warm-up.

The HP LaserJet M2727 series also features a Scan-To function that allows users to scan a document and email it directly from the printer. The HP LaserJet M2727NF is priced at Rs. 45,000/- while the M2727NFS is priced at Rs. 55,000/-.

Source:itnewsonline.com/

Canon India has introduced Original Ink Centres (OICs) in India. These Centres aim to increase consumer awareness about the advantages of using original inks for all inkjet printing products and making original inks easily available to the

consumers. The Canon Original Ink Centres will evolve as a one-stop shop for all original Canon consumables, especially inks that will largely address the customers’ needs. Canon has presently launched 18 OICs in the country, including 15 in Delhi and one each in Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune. The company aims to set up 55 such centres by June 2008.

The Original Ink Centres can be identified through a signage outside the shop featuring the colourful OIC logo. The logo itself has been designed on the traditional dance form of Kerala – Kathakali as it indicates seven colours and also originality as the inks used for painting the face are natural and each design is unique. The OIC unit comprises of a point of sale area for cartridges along with information on the current schemes, POS and also a consumable compatibility chart that offers the customers the advantage of matching their printer type to the right consumable. The originality of the consumables can be checked with lens provided on the unit to check the holograms.

The use of original inks protects the printers and gives the consumer years of flawless service and vibrant colours. Canon inks come with Chromalife 100 technology which makes the printout last for a 100 years. With increased accessibility, the consumers can now print memories, notes and greetings with a new zeal. The one-stop shop serves all the printer needs of the customers.

Source:varindia.com

Continuation of Part 1

Printer

The printing quality of all printers has improved considerably in recent years, and at the same time prices are getting lower. Colour printouts are no longer a luxury reserved for the most advanced printers. If you own a digital camera, there are even printers that can read directly from the memory card, making it unnecessary to first transfer the pictures to your computer.

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Continuation of Part 5

Document Scanning Costs

All pricing options depend of course on the selected optional features and page count limitations, if any. Setup cost depends very much on the desired level of service. It is possible for knowledgeable users to install and configure most scanning software systems. However there are many advantages to having experts to guide you through the process to ensure the fullest available automation and workflow efficiency. The biggest cost in batch scanning is without doubt the indexing process, and proper automation is vital to getting the most return from your investment document scanning software.

Continuation of Part 4

File Type Support: PDF is an overall standard, but it is useful to specify additional file types, and check what is supported by the software. It is useful to know that PDFs can create a hidden text layer that is overlaid on the scanned image, letting the viewer search, highlight and copy the OCR text while viewing the image. This function is very desirable.

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Continuation of Part 3

Multifunctional Printer (MFP) support is provided by automatically processing images from a drop folder operating in the background. Any networked MFP, digital copier, scanner or fax machine can scan images to a network folder. These applications process these images without any user intervention. Usual practice is to use printed barcode coversheets to index documents prior to scanning. This means more flexibility, in that any user can scan and index files.

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Continuation of Part 2

Other Key Scanning Software Features

Features and areas requiring attention and comparison between software brands are:

License Type: Is the license server or workstation based? Do any monthly page limits apply?

Platforms: Presently, almost all batch scanning system is limited to the Windows user environment.

Export Capabilities: How is index data exported? Keywords can be used to organize images into logical folders and filenames on a network, for example. Alternatively it can be exported to delimited text files for import into other software systems. Or again, it can be added directly to an ODBC or OleDB database.

Scanner Support: Almost all scanners support TWAIN drivers. These days, ISIS drivers are also supplied with most document scanners available. Real-time image enhancement on scanned images is supplied by Kofax - native support for Adrenaline image processing boards.

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Continuation of Part 1

Which Scanning Software Features?

The key to the best practice and most efficient document scanning is to specify as many automation features as possible to eliminate manual indexing and at the same time make all documents fully searchable.

An excellent way to achieve this is with barcodes. Barcodes can be recognised with a very high rate of speed and accuracy and a minimal possibility of false positives.

Another way is via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) which can be used to read indexes from machine print on scanned images. It's not as quick as barcodes, and the recognition rate is not as high, but it has the advantage with documents that were not designed with scanning in mind.

An efficient user-friendly interface design will also save you time in setting up, training staff and supporting the document scanning application. Clearly, staff will respond better to any work pattern changes with a more efficient interface for their daily work. For this reason the user experience must be a paramount consideration.

to be continued...