HP Lab University 2007: HP hints at scaled-down Edgeline products

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HP is looking at ways to apply its advanced Edgeline printing technology to smaller and cheaper printers, as well as looking at adding new features to products in the Edgeline range.

The company launched two Edgeline printers in April - the CM8060 and CM8050 - as part its $1.4 billion investment in scalable printing technology and, now that customers are actively using the technology, HP has started to think about what's next for the technology, Steven Miller, a distinguished technologist in HP's digital printing technologies division, told delegates at its HP Lab University event in Lisbon.

"We are exploring multiple avenues for Edgeline," he said. We're concentrating on the high performance departmental class but there are other groups exploring other areas even lower down. It won't necessarily be the same architecture so while we're exploring [future iterations] it won't always look the same."

Alluding to other future possibilities for Edgeline such as the quest for ever-greater print performance and quality, Miller added: "We're exploring all these areas and we don't know which way we'll take it yet. This is just the beginning of this technology."

"We involved customers during development and testing and we've had really good feedback, especially around reliability," said Miller. "One customer said that users would normally contact the IT department about paper jams but [since using this technology] they hadn't experienced any jams. We looked at it and it had logged quite a few jams but the users had cleared them themselves using the jam UI."

Miller showed delegates print samples of the printer's draft mode which, when compared to print-outs from a number of other competitors' products, were superior in terms of the black tone's definition and lack of colour depletion. Making use of a feature like this could save businesses around a penny a page without sacrificing quality, according to Miller.

As well as looking at future scenarios for the evolution of Edgeline, HP already has some ideas in the pipeline that will help businesses keep tighter control over their print spend.

"We are looking at smart access for use with card readers and hope to announce more publicly what we want to support by the end of the summer," said Laura Reardon, who has been involved with the technology since its conception.

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