HP hails Print 2.0

At Hewlett-Packard's annual Imaging and Printing Conference recently, the company unveiled "Print 2.0" and described how it would seek to capture a significant share of the 53 trillion digital pages estimated to be printed in 2010, an opportunity valued at more than $296+ billion. The three key focus areas of the Print 2.0 …

[GettinSadda]

Yet another verbatim press release (yawn!)

"In an effort to broaden and improve the web-printing experience, HP is creating technologies to make it easy to print content from the internet in a useful format."

"The company added eight imaging and printing solutions to its enterprise portfolio targeted at higher education, public sector, retail, transportation/logistics, and financial services industries."

"HP's efforts with SixApart and its own Tabblo technology are the genesis of what we hope will be a broader effort to map the virtual realm of web pages and other electronic information with the physical realm of paper in an intelligent and useful manner."

"The vertically focused solutions announced represent to us a convergence of communication, storage, and delivery technology across multiple media."

If there's one thing worse than a marketing-speak rich press release, it's a magazine or website that publishes it as if it were "news".

[PH]

Journalism 2.0

Excellent – a story by a company rather than an author, and written with all the insight and analysis of a press release. More of this please!

[Wonderkid]

Bad for the environment

Would be nice if HP showed some imagination over greed and instead of trying to devise even more ways to con people out of expensive printer cartridges while devouring trees at the same time, that they put their might into creating electronic paper products based on eInk technology. With their financial might they could invest in an eInk startup and develop light weight eBooks that made reading online material, books and documentation as convenient as holding a small print out or paperback book. (Sony's effort is not innovative enough, and HP can innovate when they try.) Either way, the iPhone's unique multi-touch screen is perfect for browsing content so hopefully it will be a trojan horse entry into this market for Apple. HP and other printer manufacturers may find their market collapse. Those who make buggy whips beware the inevitable future! freedomtolive . com

[Nick Ryan]

Reinvent, reinvent, never innovate

Is that the mantra of HP these days? Ignoring their branding tag lines that attempt to stress the opposite...

Printing from a website in a controlled manner is, or should be, easy - the technology has been there since CSS - just implement a "print" type CSS document and as long as you use CSS for your site layout, printing *should* be OK - problems tend to come from the non-implementation of certain browsers' CSS support.

Many web designers, on the other hand, have themselves to blame when their sites don't print properly. Starting with print designers who think they're web designers because they can slice an attractively designed image into parts and have it automatically uploaded to a website or, far worse, those who are under the delusion that flash is an acceptable content medium for an entire website. Web designers need to design their sites with printing in mind - or just media other than their own particular brand of monitor. This means less fixed size sites (typified by lines like "best viewed in X browser at XYZ resolution") and more liquid design. Post display hacks in JavaScript (or J-Script for those using IE) and other technologies really should *never* be used to size, scale or layout content on a web page. The use of frames is also an old problem that cripples a browser's ability to print, among other things that frames break.

Not that it's entirely the website designers' fault - printing from browsers has been haphazard at best and it's only recently that the likes of IE got "print preview" - it's still far behind others in terms of control though. Unfortunately printing from a web browser seems to be a very unfashionable end of browser design and it still far behind the rest in terms of useability, stability and functionality.

[Matthew Macdonald-Wallace]

Does this mean...

that my printer will now have it's own MySpace Page?

[Mike]

I'd be more impressed...

If HP could come up with an upgrade to my 3210 that wasn't a downgrade.

Starting with _not_ BSODing if I try to use its network port, then move on to scanning a set of pages without occasionally forgetting the settings.

Feh!