I want to take a moment to highlight some of the very interesting offerings in the personal and small work-team space. This includes new printer, all-in-one (multifunction) and scanning devices.

Take a look at this press announcement for new personal and small work-team OfficeJet (printer and multifunction) and Color LaserJet (printer) devices. I’ll simply add the following comments:

• Most corporate and public sector customers don’t think of ink as being able to save them money. With the OfficeJet Pro platform, the costs are extremely competitive with LaserJet and Color LaserJet offerings. Consult with your sales representatives to see if an OfficeJet Pro K-series (single function printer) or L-series (multifunction all-in-one) is right for your needs based on how it’s used, the type and volume of jobs, etc.
• Color laser devices have traditionally been cost-prohibitive for large corporations or cheap from competitive manufacturers and unreliable or costly to maintain. With the announcements in the Color LaserJet printer series, HP brings its legendary reliability and maintenance free operation into Color LaserJet devices as low as $299 USD. These devices produce amazing output previously capable on commercial network print devices only. Many include an HP In-house Marketing Kit as well.

Before the winter holidays, HP announced a roll of its commercial ScanJet platform. Many commercial and public sector customers may see this as a minor announcement, but after having had direct experience with the hardware, software and solutions (and being wildly impressed) I have to share a few key findings:

• These scanners are amazingly quick. With instant-on lamps and dual-headed CCD scanners, 2-sided documents can be scanned at an impressive 70 images-per-minute.
• These models include ultra-sonic multi-feed detection catching paper-jams earlier in the process and ensuring documents are scanned in their entirety.
• Kofax Virtual Re-Scan (VRS) is included in-box. If you’ve not seen a demonstration of VRS, simply-put it cleans up documents (mitigating highlighter marks, stains, gradients, etc.) to make them readable or OCR and archive purposes with highly-compressed output.
• The included software footprint is quite manageable with an enterprise focus using the HP Smart Document Scan Software (SDSS) – which takes advantage of Kofax VRS optionally above as well. This SDSS software allows administrators to pre-define workflows to destinations (including the ability to push a scanned document against an application, printer or remote folder). The software includes the ability to preview documents before submission, logical document separation in batches using barcode split sheets, blank page suppression, auto orientation, etc.

While familiarizing myself with these technologies and working with another customer who had adaptive technology interests, something very interesting began to gel for me which this low-cost commercial scanning solution is able to offer.

With the touch of a physical button on these devices, a person who has a visual impairment can take a paper document (regardless of orientation or number of sides) directly into their Kurzweil application to do an automated document-to-text-to-speech translation with optional direct output to a Braille/Ink combo printer. These devices and bundled software solutions help to offer possibilities that may have been costly to implement or not easily implemented by administrators. More information on accessibility for persons with disabilities or age related limitations is available here. What’s more, because this offers simple one-touch capabilities, this provides an attractive copy and/or paperless workflow solution for other cases where the user is expected to maintain face-contact with a client or processing high-volumes of jobs.

So what’s next? There are some other very interesting technologies and products around the corner. I’ll communicate those as they’re announced publicly. For the next article, I’ll be completing Part 3 of the color access control series using the Universal Print Driver.

You tell me. Is there any interest in delving into the world of print solutions? Maybe a focus around security is of interest? Are there any examples you’d like to share about how you are using printing and/or capture technology? Maybe you have a question about how to route a document using a paper-based workflow using electronic means we can cover.

Send me your comments and topics you’d like to see covered.