I recently attended the launch of the Xerox ColorQube where I heard a number of industry analysts declare how much it was going to revolutionize the industry.
After listening to the presentation I have to say I would agree .... well sort of!
In my opinion, the technology within the ColorQube is a market-changing development but for entirely different reasons that Xerox would probably want me to believe. Xerox has leveraged the controller within the new ColorQube to finally make color more affordable and practical for the average organization. They are actually using the pixel counting that occurs during raster image processing to differentiate color pages and their associated costs. This is one of those things that is brilliant due to the simplicity of concept but potental impact.
What this is going to do is allow Xerox to profitably charge for color pages as low as one cent per page and an average that is probably somewhere about three to four cents. The potential cost savings to an end-user is in the thousands of dollars per year per MFD, something I think will be attractive.
There are additional benefits such as sustainability due to the low waste associated with this technology, variable color print speeds and application driven color quality but none are as impactful as the simple pixel counting.
The solid ink technology, similar to laser and inkjet, has its limitations and I am not sure how well the end-user community will accept it to drive the success of the ColorQube itself. In spite of this, if Xerox has done a good job with patents and can exclusively apply this billing approach to their other technologies such as color laser they may well revolutionize the industry.
It will be interesting to see how other manufacturers react to this simple application of technology - and how they will get around any Xerox patents that may exist.
Link to the ColorQube 9200 on the Xerox Web Site
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
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As a sales rep for an agency, I am really excited about the ColorQube. My customers are intrigued and want to learn more about this new green, cost-effective technology. The line of Phasers, Xerox's smaller solid ink printers, have done well. I think that solid ink could be a game changer for regular office printing. It's not suitable for color production. But it's the closest thing to a near perfect technology in business printing.
ReplyDeleteThis is far from revolutionary, HP Edgeline product has had the ability to do this for almost 2 years, and costs thousands of dollars less for the equipment.
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