Comments on: Dead Trees and PCs: HP’s Innovation Challenge

By: Rob

Rob — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 20:26:00 +0000

Who out there had a HP c309 Photosmart Premium AiO with a wireless card that failed not long out of warranty that HP failed to stand behind?

Who out there owns an OfficeJet Pro 8500A Plus for which HP won’t release a firmware update so as to make this device compatable with the HP printer Control app?

HP is a shti shell of it’s former great self. So sad.

By: solomon_rex

solomon_rex — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:27:00 +0000

Printers are a terrible business to be in. They need minimal investment in that area, because smartphones and ereaders and tablets are replacing printer’s few remaining functions. Tax season will see a lot of B&W prints as foolproof backups, and some people do physical photos for the house. But it’s a category that is obsolete. Ink and paper and complicated machines are a poor solution to viewing an agenda in a business meeting, and an increasingly pricey luxury in a world of tablets.

HP eprint will never catch on. I have google cloud print, and so will anyone else with a google account, which is nearly the entire world. Printing isn’t a separate task from creation for people, which is why an integrated service like cloud print makes more sense than yet another web account to sign up for.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:06:00 +0000

My Photosmart 7960 from 2004 is still going strong and makes very high quality prints.
Weighs like 30 pounds or so. Sill works under 7/8…that`s VALUE.
Maybe if they made them cheap like newer stuff , they would sell more.
My Epson 1650 high resolution flatbed scanner with film adapter from year 2000 from Fry`s (Epson refurb) $30 on sale gets used daily works like a champ under7/8 using VueScan software.

By: jdale

jdale — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:28:00 +0000

There are some clever ideas they could leverage. Selective printing would not be hard to implement, especially if there is a touchscreen control on the printer. If only they had an OS suited for such small displays. There was a lot of talk about that, it just has yet to happen.

Another idea they already have is touch-to-share. Given where things are going, they should make it NFC instead of proprietary, but the basic idea of touching a phone or tablet to the printer to print a webpage or document seems nicely seamless. Again, especially if they put WebOS there so there is room to tweak how it prints.