HP has announced a new line of 16 A3 multifunction printers, 13 of them featuring Samsung print engines, following its acquisition of Samsung’s laser printer business.
With this new line of LaserJet and PageWide multi-function printers, HP is looking beyond its traditional office printer stronghold towards the $55 billion A3 copier market; a market where it has less than 5% market share.
It hopes that its strengths in management and security will be a powerful differentiator over products from the likes of Ricoh, Canon and Xerox.
HP claims that Samsung’s engines will enable longer-life components, faster repair times and lower TCO than existing products, with page speeds rising from 22ppm up to 60ppm.
Meanwhile, three new HP PageWide Enterprise and Pro devices will offer lower colour costs, best in class print speeds and lower energy consumption, with speeds of up to 60ppm or 80ppm in general office mode. This is the first time HP’s Inkjet-based technology has been used in an A3 office printer.
Whether based on PageWide or on Samsung’s laser technology, all models will share a common UI and a full suite of management and security features, including intrusion detection and HP’s Sure Start bios protection.
HP plans to sell the new line through a growing network of managed print services partners, with the new models designed from the ground-up for use on contract, with longer-lasting parts and consumables, modular parts that are easier to replace plus cloud-based tools for remote diagnostics.
The PageWide models benefit from the simpler mechanical architecture, which, HP claims, should require 90 percent fewer part replacements over the typical lifespan of the printer. The resulting lower service costs – decreasing by up to 20 percent - should reduce costs or enhance margins for HP’s partners.
"We are strong in the A4 market," said David Ryan, general manager of HP’s print business in EMEA, "but we are a small player in the A3 market, which represents about half of the total addressable market in EMEA."
He added: "When we talked about core growth last September, we were very clear that we wanted to expand into the copier market. Bringing a broader and much more competitive range of contractual A3 devices to market is very much the execution of that."
The new devices are expected to be on sale from Q2 2017.
