Getting your thermal right has never been so difficult. In printer terms anyway. Do you go for the familiar thermal inkjet printer, or risk a try with the thermal transfer machines which have been confined to the rarefied studios of serious graphics users until now and cost around UKP7,000? While they seemed to be offering different things to different users in the past, the two technologies are now converging and it is just about time to stand up and be counted as supporter of either one. Market research group BIS Strategic Decisions Ltd believes the market for desktop colour printers will grow 27% annually over the next five years from a base of around 150,000 machines sold in 1992.
Smears and bleed
That means the value will triple to over $2,800m in 1995 from $987m today. So what are the pros and cons of each technology? Ink jet, say its admirers, offers bright, highly saturated colours in a cheap printer with low cost per copy. Its detractors say it needs special paper to avoid smears and bleed, warm-up time is lengthy while the ink liquefies, colours fade and are not waterproof, print time is slow and it is expensive when using high page coverage, and the ink may run out mid-operation, but the printing, infuriatingly, continues. Afficionados of thermal wax transfer technology point to its reliability, high colour quality and low running costs when used for high coverage. But against that, machines have traditionally been prohibitively expensive, need special paper, are costly to use where page coverage is low and the wax is vulnerable to being peeled off. Two thermal wax printers have now arrived to challenge these limitations: the Fargo Electronics Inc Primera and the Star Micronics Co Ltd’s SJ-144, both priced at under $1,000. Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based Fargo introduced a sub-$1,000 thermal transfer printer at last November’s Comdex. Fargo began life in Fargo, North Dakota in 1978 where it focussed on bar code printing. It prospered and in 1989 introduced its Prodigy and Prodigy Plus bar code printers, but it went off the whole thing and turned to something more interesting instead, and in March this year sold its bar code printer division to Datamax Inc, an Orlando, Florida supplier of airline ticket, boarding pass and baggage tag printers. The $1,000 Primera retails for closer to $800 and costs around UKP800 in the UK. The low cost is achieved through shortcuts like omitting PostScript, multiple resident fonts, high-powered chips and all but the absolute essential number of memory chips. Fargo has now introduced a photo-realistic upgrade kit, to be available here within weeks. The $250 package enables the Primera to do photo quality dye sublimation printing: so any IBM-compatible personal computer user can run off colour copies of their photos, for about $3 per print. Star Micronics’s new baby won the best printer at Comdex Spring, and it costs UKP570 or $560 depending on which side of the Atlantic you are lucky enough to live. Alps Electric Co worked with Star on the print head in Japan, and they have come up with a 5.5 lbs machine that simultaneously prints three lines of text at up to three pages per minute mono, or up to 1.4 pages per minute in colour. Fargo offers its own paper as standard but Star says the SJ-144 can run on any paper.
By Kate Potter
That is quite a claim since wax is a hard substance and does not rest easily on the peaks and troughs of even relatively smooth office paper. Tektronix Inc has patented a technology to get around the problem. A primer is laid down to create a smooth base before the wax goes on, which Tektronix marketing manager Jason Cort said does not affect the print speed. The Phaser 200e claims a two pages per minute speed, but the machine still costs a hefty UKP3,500, and is clearly headed for the corporate network. Cort said Tektronix will remain in this market and is not tempted to compete at the 550C end. Although it does have an inkjet offering, just to be safe. One of the most vocal thermal transfer evangelists is consultant Andre Gigon, who must surely have
been a victim of the Hewlett-Packard Co inkjet brigade in an earlier life. His business, which involves advising Star, is based on his knowledge of the non-impact technology market, and he is frankly amazed there is still anyone out there buying inkjet. He has drawn up a scoreboard of 16 reasons reasons why thermal transfer is superior to inkjet. He believes colour inkjets are mainly used for monochrome work, unlike colour thermal transfers which are really used for colour. Gigon quotes the Rochester Institute of Technology as saying cost per colour page rates can be misleading. Where suppliers show 50% to 100% colour coverage on their literature, the cost they mention is calculated for coverage as limited as 8%. Since the trend is for a higher proportion of colour coverage, particularly in presentations, that matters. He concludes: Over a century and $5,000m to $10,000m after the discovery of the phenomenon that gave birth to liquid inkjet printing, it is still a black art rather than a science, while colour thermal transfer is a mature technology that has dominated the colour professional market for 10 years whose suppliers are now heading into mainstream offices by trimming the excess, not the technology. In more moderate mood, Gigon says that worldwide in 1992, 20m colour monitors and 21m printers were sold. A meagre 2.3m of the printers were colour, and Hewlett-Packard alone accounted for 900,000. He says the reluctance to move to colour is mainly down to perceptions of it as a low-speed technology that demands special paper. And thermal transfer developers have done little to alter that, selling to high end graphics users whose priority is quality. So is it set to change now that this high end quality is (more or less) available at a low end price?
No plans
Hewlett-Packard hopes not. Andrew Gunyon, Hewlett’s deskjet marketing manager, recognises there is a threat from thermal wax printers, but is unfazed. Hewlett has no plans to develop the technology itself and is putting its might behind inkjets. In May this year it released its latest models, the 1200C and 1200/PS printers. They offer 600 by 300 dpi with Hewlett-Packard Resolution, and 300dpi full colour printing. More colours and Pantone support are available and they operate, like laser printers, with four print cartridges – cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Gunyon said more nozzles – now over 130 – are on board to speed up printing, and claims six pages per minute for black text, one to two minutes per page for colour and graphics. Subsequently, Hewlett has cut prices on the older 500 line (CI No 2,224) so the 510 colour is 31% cheaper at UKP320. Gunyon: We think thermal inkjet is the way forward, and as we know, what Hewlett wants….
