HP Unveils Cavalcade of Consumer Products

NEW YORK -- Hewlett-Packard expects to ship in the next few weeks 158 new consumer products, ranging from cameras and photo printers to PCs. The deluge was announced here Monday amid company executives' repeated emphasis that HP's consumer strategy is not about products, but about "experiences."

It is, in some ways, a seemingly incongruous message. Technology products--lots and lots of them--clearly have more than a little to do with HP's strategy. Standing before an array of PCs, cameras, printers, scanners, ink cartridges, and other HP offerings, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina joked that the company was announcing "almost as many products as there are gubernatorial candidates in California." (Would-be governors currently number 195.)

The "experience" slogan refers to how HP believes consumers think about technology--and how it plans to market its consumer products. HP wants to get away from speeds and feeds, and focus on providing pleasing results without needless complexity, executives say; the words "simple" and "rewarding" kept cropping up during the launch presentations.

Also clear from the day's presentations: HP wants consumers to think of its suite of products--from PCs to ink cartridges--as an end-to-end solution to create, edit, preserve, and share rich-media content. "You are the storyteller," said Fiorina of HP's message to customers.

Focus on Photos

HP offers some storytelling tools involving video and music. But its biggest star is photography--no surprise given the company's long roots in imaging technology.

New digital photography products include four new cameras, priced starting at $149, and Image Zone, a program to organize, archive, and print snapshots. But the most striking photography product may be a new entry in the seemingly mundane category of flatbed scanners.

HP's $149 Scanjet 4600 looks more like a high-tech picture frame than a traditional flatbed scanner. Users can remove the see-through unit from its base and hold it up to scan oversize or three-dimensional objects, letting it capture images beyond the capabilities of standard flatbeds.

Among the six new Photosmart ink jet printers, the $299 Photosmart 7960 stands out. The first eight-color model aimed at home users, the Photosmart can contain three cartridges, and has four options: black, tri-color, photo, and a new photo gray ink. HP says one of its benefits is improved black-and-white photographic prints--and a gallery of photos at the product launch did look good.

Also new: the PSC 2510 Photosmart All-in-One, a combination printer, flatbed fax, scanner, and copier, priced at $399. The device has built-in wireless technology and can download photos directly from a digital camera; photo printing hits 4800 by 1200 dots per inch. A model without wireless networking built in, the PSC 2410, is priced at $299.

At the entry level is the $99 Photosmart 7260 photo printer, which supports six-color printing or up to 4800-optimized dpi.

HP also introduced a handful of new color ink jet printers and Scanjet scanners, mostly updates of existing lines. The low-end new digicam is the 3.1-megapixel Photosmart 435, with 16MB of internal memory, priced at $149.

Addressing Accessories

Even digital photography enthusiasts typically voice one gripe: prices of the necessary consumables. HP acknowledges the concern, and is introducing HP Everyday Photo Paper. At 10 to 15 cents a sheet, it's the industry's least expensive photo paper, according to HP.

"For 5-by-7 and 8-by-10, we're already cheaper than [commercial digital photo printing services]," says Mary Peery, senior vice president of HP's Digital Imaging and Publishing Organization. The new paper "will drive costs down for 4-by-6 prints."

As for non-photographic products, the day's biggest announcement is the DVD Movie Writer Dc3000. A unique external unit that connects to a PC by a USB 1.1 or 2.0 port, the Movie Writer is aimed at people who want to transfer home movies from videotape to DVD. It provides video inputs, analog-to-digital conversion and compression, and a DVD burner in one integrated device.

Back to the PC

Some aspects of the HP mega-product launch hint at a less PC-centric future. Several executives spoke of the company's moving from the home office--where the PC has long ruled-- into the less PC-centric living room and kitchen.

But the day's announcements don't suggest a radical shift into consumer electronics territory--a strategy that HP rival Gateway is pursuing. Rather, HP--which was the first company to ship a PC that runs Microsoft's living room-oriented Windows Media Center software--is aiming to push PCs themselves in a more entertaining, media-savvy direction.

For example, the new HP Pavilion Zd7000 notebook, priced starting at $1499, is designed for digital entertainment and photography. It has a wide-screen 17-inch display, Harmon/Kardon speakers, a memory card reader that handles five card formats, and 802.11g wireless networking.

Also, HP is reaching out to a new kind of prospective customer: the serious gamer who wants the latest and greatest hardware. Such buyers tend to build their own systems, says Sam Szteinbaum, North American computing vice president and general manager. But he says HP's size enables the company to build gaming systems for sale at an attractive price.

"If they bought the same components, they'd spend considerably more. These will have high-end processors, lots of memory, lots of space to cool really well," Szteinbaum says. But the gaming PCs "will have a minimal software load, because these users tell us they have their own software and don't want to be hand-held." HP plans to launch a pilot program later this year to market such PCs through selected resellers.

Enter the Server?

HP also expects to expand its line of media center devices as computing shifts from the home office PC into the living room, Szteinbaum notes. As computing and consumer electronics merge, HP may introduce special-purpose computing devices in the future that aren't PCs.

The home media servers that have been promoted as a PC replacement could finally gain momentum, he adds: "People have been talking talking about server products for a long, long time--just like they talked about convergence for seven years, and it's finally happening."

Streaming video on wireless networks is the application that could drive home media servers, Szteinbaum says.

"You'll see a desire for a server with a library of movies and music and home-oriented content," he says. "Once it's all in one place, you can move it around the house or move it to a portable device."

Although Szteinbaum doubts media servers will be truly pervasive soon, he expects 5 to 10 percent of households could adopt them within the next couple of years.

More Future Tech

Whatever the PC's future, HP also offered a peek at some lab prototypes that incorporate technologies that may wind up in consumer products.

Its Web-based translation system, for instance, may eventually let traveling shutterbugs use a digital camera to capture text from signs in foreign languages, then translate them on the fly. The system requires a wireless Internet connection; it won't appear in real cameras for at least a few years, an HP official says.

Also from the lab: prototypical tablet-like display devices designed to meld the user-friendliness of paper with the technological conveniences of digital delivery. Unlike some existing e-books, these thin-film display devices don't have touch screens, which can hurt legibility. Instead, strips along the sides of the screen let the user slide a finger to move backward and forward in an e-text.

Challenge: Simplicity

Ultimately, HP's launch event was mostly about products it will ship in upcoming weeks--and those products will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. And for all the talk of simplicity, HP officials readily admit the company is taking early steps on a long road.

Though CEO Fiorina says HP has reduced the number of steps needed to snap a digital photo and print it from 57 to 3, her presentation also spoofed the experience with a funny clip from Comedy Central's satirical The Daily Show. The program's "Digital Watch" tech expert neatly detailed all the downsides of digital photography: It's complicated and expensive, and batteries conk out at the worst possible times.

The clip was a clever takedown of technology-company hype--and it was disarming that HP showed it at a technology product launch.

"Digital entertainment and photography are industries in transformation," says HP's Peery. "And transformations take 10 to 15 years."

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