According to the company the new press will compete head on in the 2-up monochrome toner replacement market currently dominated by Infoprint, Kodak, Océ, Screen and Xerox.

The T200 is a 61m/minute colour, or 120m/minute mono, 520mm-wide (2-up) machine capable of producing 23m colour or 46m mono pages per month, and uses the same thermal inkjet technology as its bigger brother the T300, which is a 760mm-wide, 120m/minute and 70m page-permonth machine. The T300 was unveiled at Drupa.

"The biggest innovation is the single-engined duplex full-colour paperpath,"said HP Inkjet Highspeed Production Solutions general manager Aurelio Maruggi.

HP T200: to take on toner giants

The T200 will be demonstrated live on stand AB150 in Hall 12 duplexing without the use of turner bars, which the firm claimed provided extremely tight front-to-back registration in a small (2.1x5.8m) footprint.

"With the T300 the strategy was about moving digital from a niche to the mainstream," said HP Inkjet High-speed Production Solutions marketing director Scott Schiller. "We went to the largest players in our target markets and made a transformation play, for example with CPI in books and Communisis in direct mail. The T200 is 180 degrees different; this fits in where monochrome toner has been the primary technology and is designed to drop in with no disruption to the workflow and no additional investment in finishing."

"The aim was not to over-specify. We've tuned it so the economics are not too heavy," said Schiller.

However, he declined to reveal pricing for the T200, stating: "We don't talk about the economics as our customers have said their potential customers use it against them. But the variable costs will be inline with those of the T300 and the hardware costs inline with competitive machines."

The T200 is being shown as a technology demonstration at Ipex, although HP said that it might announce details of the first beta customers later in the show.