Topic: IBM offers superfast laser printer

[Clive]

September 9, 2005: 6:59 AM EDT
 
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - IBM is stepping up its push into business publishing by launching what it calls the world's fastest printing system of its kind.

The device, IBM said late Thursday, can churn out Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in less than a minute or print documents spanning the Empire State Building in less than 4 minutes. It starts at about $500,000 and the top-of-the-line version costs $1 million, said Robert Cooper, director of product printing for the Armonk, N.Y.-based company.

At 330 pages a minute, the newest version of IBM's Infoprint 4100 is faster than any other heavy-duty toner-based laser printer, said Angele Boyd of market researcher IDC. Some ink-jet printers are faster, she added.

The IBM (Research) printer spits out documents on paper rolls that have to be cut into pages by another device, Cooper said. It's about as long as a sport utility vehicle and half as wide, he added.

International Business Machines Corp. spun off its desktop printer business, Lexmark International Inc. (Research), in 1991. The company has been making business printers for 30 years, Cooper said.

"This 4100 series has been a very successful product," Cooper said in an interview. For customers such as banks, phone companies and government agencies that produce hundreds of millions of pages of documents per year, the printer "provides more throughput in less amount of time, and that means to them a lower cost of production."

The high-speed printer market has been growing at 4 percent a year and reached $6.1 billion in 2004, said Jim Hamilton of market researcher InfoTrends in Weymouth, Mass. It's expected to hit $7.4 billion by 2009, he said.

IBM last year was the market leader with a 49.6 percent share, followed by Oce (Research), based in the Netherlands., with 43.8 percent, according to InfoTrends.

Cooper said IBM sees growth opportunities in large-capacity printing as marketers increasingly use direct mail to target customers. "Mail remains a very good way to market your business," he said, because consumers are overwhelmed by unsolicited e-mails, or spam, and don't like getting called by telemarketers.

And while consumers can access their bank accounts online, many still want a paper statement as well, he added.

 
http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/09/technology/ibm_printer.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes