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In step with a trend by printer companies to increasingly blur the line between printed and digital documents, Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday will introduce three new multifunction printers, which integrate printing, scanning, copying, e-mailing, and faxing into a single unit.

HP will also step up promotion of its options to purchase, lease, outsource, or pay-as-you for the new HP printers, said Troy Browne, worldwide shared printing products manager with HP.

Since mainstream printers with their own IP addresses began arriving in volume last year, printer companies such as HP, Canon, Xerox, and others have been evolving their printers into multifunction devices that can manipulate and send documents without the intervention of a PC.

With the introduction of the HP LaserJet 3300, the HP LaserJet 4100, and the HP LaserJet 9000, HP has delivered multifunction products with performance on a par with separate single-function print, scan, copy, fax, and e-mail devices, said Keith Kmetz, program director for printer research at IDC.

"This time around HP has a truly integrated device: a printer with the look and feel of a copier," Kmetz said. "What we've seen from printer vendors before was a half-hearted attempt at copying, but if companies are getting only convenience-oriented functionality, they are not going to accept that in their portfolio of devices."

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The HP LaserJet 3300 is targeted at small and medium-size businesses and prints 15 pages per minute (ppm) with a copy speed of 14 ppm. The LaserJet 4100 is designed for larger workgroups and can churn out 25 ppm as a printer, copier, or scanner. The LaserJet 9000 is for large, networked business environments and runs at 50 ppm as a printer, copier, or scanner, according to HP.

Each new HP printer comes equipped with a send-to-e-mail function that can quickly scan and e-mail a document, which arrives as a .jpg, .tif, or .pdf format attachment, Browne said.

Advanced "Digital Sending" technology will be available this summer as an upgrade to each of the new printers. With Digital Sending, users will not only have access to advanced document and e-mail management features, but will also be able to send secure, encrypted e-mail attachments that direct the recipient to go to a special Web site for a password to open the attachment.

"Printing is becoming a convergence space," Browne said. "The lines between printing, faxing, and scanning are all blurring. It's more about what customers want to do with their printed pages and less about the individual products."

Partners for Products

Moving in that same direction, Xerox, along with document capture software company Kofax, last week announced that the two companies have integrated Xerox's Document Centre multifunction systems with Kofax's Ascent Ricochet document capture software. This means Xerox customers will soon have the capability to manage, track, update, and deliver scanned documents within a Web browser environment, according to Xerox representatives.

Similarly, through a partnership with print technology company eCopy, Canon has been delivering its own flavor of printer, copier, fax, scan, and e-mail multifunctionality. On the market since last year, the Canon/eCopy technology links interfaces with the Domino and Lotus Notes platforms to tightly integrate document traffic with company e-mail networks, according to eCopy representatives.

Like the new HP printers, the Canon/eCopy systems offer a wide range of functions, such as the ability to send scanned documents as e-mails to multiple recipients and to use workflow tools like levels of authentication for access to certain documents.

IBM, also a player in the multifunction printer market, still mainly offers its multifunction systems to the high-end commercial production printing market, said IDC's Kmetz.

"What I see is a much stronger push into the multifunction market from the small to medium[-size] business printer perspective," Kmetz said. "The printer companies have been really slow in providing solutions in the workgroup and departmental segments of the printer market," the markets in which companies such as HP, Canon, and Xerox are most popular, Kmetz said.

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