HP unveils ePrint-enabled printers

SINGAPORE — Hewlett-Packard unveiled here recently its groundbreaking ePrint-enabled and Web-connected printers for businesses, resulting in many new firsts for the company and the industry in general.

An ePrint enabled HP printer uniquely features its own e-mail address that users can use to send their print jobs remotely using any connected device such as laptops and smartphones.

This marks the first time a person can actually e-mail a printer directly which, in essence, unlocks the barriers of time and location and further reduces the instances when one cannot print.

HP’s ePrint technology lifts up the office printer’s value from being a basic peripheral to a smart device that can independently perform its job without a PC and software drivers and instead have its own online and security features.

“To solve real customer needs, printers are no longer dumb devices but an on-ramp to the cloud so that if you can e-mail them, you should also be able to print (using) them,” said John Solomon, senior vice president of HP Imaging and Printing Group for the Asia-Pacific and Japan.

‘To solve real customer needs, printers are no longer dumb devices but an on-ramp to the cloud so that if you can e-mail them, you should also be able to print (using) them,’ said John Solomon, senior vice president of HP Imaging and Printing Group for the Asia-Pacific and Japan.

HP’s new ePrint technology is present in the company’s latest series of Officejets, Laserjets and Designjets. They could work with any computer, smartphone or other devices with e-mail sending capabilities.

According to HP officials, 85 percent of smartphone users today want to be able to print something from their smartphones. But since smartphones have no printer ports, this physical limitation can be resolved by leveraging the Web feature of a printer.

“All devices with e-mail capabilities can now send a print job to an ePrint-enabled HP printer as our technology removes the need for special software drivers,” said Solomon.

By 2012, Solomon said the volume of digital content will snowball up to 10 times more and in turn will triple the amount of printable document around the world.

With an estimated 200 billion pages of content going digital each year, at least 12 billion pages are generated from mobile devices.

With these numbers, a Web-connected printer becomes a must-have to support the printing needs of the estimated 1.2 billion mobile workers by 2013, explained Solomon.

HP e-printers

The new Officejets, Laserjets and Designjets that offer customers the freedom and convenience to print from any mobile device using HP’s ePrint technology include the HP Officejet Pro 8500A e-All-in-One series, the HP Officejet 7500A Wide Format e-All-in-One, the HP Officejet 6500A e-All-in-One, the HP Designjet T2300 e-multifunction printer (eMFP), the HP Laserjet Pro CM1415fnw Color MFP, and the HP Laserjet Pro CP1025 and CP1025nw color printers.

The HP Laserjet Pro CP1025 and CP1025nw are the world’s smallest color laser printers and among the world’s most energy-efficient color laser printers that retail for $229. Both models are ePrint-enabled.

The HP Officejet 7500A Wide Format e-All-in-One is the world’s first wide format all-in-one device with Web connectivity.

The Designjet T2300 eMultifunction printer is the industry’s first Web-ready large-format printer.

The HP Laserjet Pro CM1415fnw Color MFP is the first HP Laserjet printer that prints from the Web and mobile devices.

HP officials said any software updates for the new ePrint-capable printers can be directly downloaded to the units. Their unique passwords can also be reset at any time.

Customers can also set a “white list” to ensure they only receive prints from a select list of e-mail addresses. Aside from keeping an approved senders’ list, the new printers also have spam filtering utilities as well as the HP ePrint and Share application that allows users to automatically create, print, share and manage files online using desktops or mobile devices.

As a key print service provider, HP also introduced two-way print through the Internet using HP Print Apps which gives customers access to ready templates and other content stored on the Web that they can print without a PC as the content are accessible directly from the printers’ touch-screen displays. HP Print Apps currently supports applications from Google Docs, Box.net, Biztree, Yahoo!7, and Yahoo!Xtra.