Bangalore: There are inkjet printers and laser printers — and the twain shall never meet when it comes to any one application. That has been the conventional wisdom for over 20 years, when black and white laser printers were fast, economical to run — but too costly for individual home-users.

For them, the industry churned out hundreds of colour inkjet printers, which were slow, very cheap but cost a lot to keep running with original cartridges.

New range

It is time to ditch these principles. The furious pace of development in the printer business has blurred the sharp distinctions between laser and inkjet technologies: entry-level black and white lasers are almost as cheap as budget inkjets. The world's number one printer-maker Hewlett

Packard has launched a new range of Officejet Pro machines — inkjet-based printers, which are almost a third cheaper to run and almost as fast as the fastest laser printers available today.

As part of the launch of the latest Officejet models last week, this correspondent was enabled to `test-drive' what is claimed to be "the world's fastest desktop colour business printer:"The Officejet Pro K550. This Rs. 7,999 machine is rated to print draft quality black and white pages at up to 37 pages per minute (ppm) and draft colour pages at 33 ppm. In the strict sense, there is a printer or two which print marginally faster — but they cost over Rs. 1 lakh.

More interestingly, the per-page cost too is lower than what one would expect from either monochrome or colour laser machines — between 25 and 30 per cent lower is claimed though this can be verified only under controlled conditions.

Readers used to the leisurely speeds from most home inkjets and lasers will be surprised at how fast the sheets come out flying, even in medium print quality settings.

In the best quality setting, it will be near impossible to tell a typical printed page from one produced by a good laser printer.

However this is not a machine for a photo freak: its best quality may not match that of the slower, cheaper Photosmart printers.

Four cartridges

Unlike the entry-level inkjet printers, K550 comes with four separate cartridges — cyan, magenta, yellow and black — and the twin printheads, which interpret the software and push the ink on to the paper, are separate from the cartridges.

HP's new `Vivera' printing inks used in this model are pigments rather than dyes — something that is normally done only in the costlier corporate printers, to achieve quick drying and longer life.

In a telephonic briefing on Saturday, HP's country marketing manager for Business Inkjets and Scanners, Ashwini Aggarwal, clarified that while K550 printed up to A4 size, another model released last week, K850, priced at just under Rs 21,000, printed at similar speeds up to the large format A3 size.

For those who did not need the zippy speeds of these models, HP has launched two multifunction Officejets — 4355 and 6318 — to print, fax, scan and copy to similar quality, albeit more slowly.

They are priced at just below Rs. 7,000 and 13,000.

"These printers mark a paradigm shift in printing technology," said Mr. Aggarwal.

"They deliver an altogether new level of productivity to small businesses at new breakthrough prices"

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