Despite this situation HP has just announced very good financial results for Q1 of this year with increased market shares in most area of its business. This has particularly been the case in the office and consumer printer markets where HP maintains its leadership positions.

I have just had the opportunity to attend a unique HP educational and promotional event, this being the "HP Labs University". This is an event held for HP's EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region at which over 300 journalists and analysts spend three days in Tenerife.

This was a particularly interesting event as it concentrated on HP's areas of innovation and development, emphasising the HP Invent element of its corporate identity. It gave a very good indication of the company's future business directions. The key aspect of the event was its concentration on the consumer and lifestyle markets. The majority of journalists came from the computer, photographic and lifestyle press.

HP is a massive business and perhaps over the past twenty years has been the most successful IT based supplier in the industry. It has a turnover of around 46bn ($80 bn), which at this time predominantly comes from the office and SOHO printing markets and from IT and IT services. In most of these areas it maintains a market leadership or near market leadership position, but in most of these areas it is getting increasing levels of competition.

Lifestyle market
For HP to grow and become a $100 billion plus company it needs to develop new markets, and in this it is targeting the consumer lifestyle market. In this it is setting itself up to challenge companies like Sony, and to endeavour to gain market leadership in the digital photographic market. The future for HP is to retain its strong position in the office and SOHO areas, but to move its technology and products into the living space in the home.

In Tenerife we were shown a range of new products that will be released during the course of 2005, unfortunately few of which can be mentioned at this time. One of the keys technologies in many of these products is HP's new fourth generation inkjet print head. HP was one of the inventors of thermal inkjet printing around twenty years ago. Since that time it has installed a staggering 250m inkjet printers. The key factor with this is each printer has generated a huge amount of ongoing revenue for HP in consumable ink sales.

The new 4th generation head that has just been announced has increased performance, higher resolution, smaller ink drops, and lower running costs than previous heads. Compared with the previous (current) head it has almost six times as many nozzles in a similar space, each nozzle firing at a 25% higher rate. Each head has a true resolution per colour of 1,200 spots per inch with almost 1,000 nozzles per colour. Each printhead prints two colours at a time and dependant upon the configuration required for a specific application, up to four heads can be used to print up to eight colours per pass.

Replaceable cartridges
The speed of firing of the drops has been increased with the head running at 24 KHz. In a four-colour printer that means approaching 100m ink drops are fired per second. To link up with the heads, which are designed for the lifetime of the printer, are new high-volume replaceable ink cartridges.

So who said thermal drop on demand couldn't operate as fast as piezo drop on demand or continuous ink jet technologies? As HP rolls out products using these new printheads we will be able to see the impact of this performance in the different office of photo printing markets. The quality I saw from the different products demonstrated was exceptional, and one can understand HP's optimism in expectation of expansion of its market share in all its markets where it sells inkjet-printing devices.

The graphic arts market, and in particular the expanding role of digital printing does not appear to be very prominent in HP's radar at this time. I was particularly interested to hear more about Indigo at the event, but there was nothing to be heard officially. There was an HP Indigo 5000 press, but it appeared to almost be there as an after thought. It was not used to print the daily newsletter of the event, this being produced on a Color Laserjet 9500 office printer. In the medium performance digital printing market HP did make a significant announcement. This was a discontinuation of its agreement with Konica Minolta to sell their monochrome and colour multi-function printers. The agreement is not to stop selling them at this time, but not to continue with developments, and to replace the products with HP's own products over the next two years. I tried, without any real success, to find out more about what would be the technology behind these future HP products.

It could be feasible, looking at the firing speeds of the latest inkjet heads, to envisage that head stitching could create a page width array of heads. I don't believe that this will be the approach as HP sees inkjet technology and these fourth generation heads as one of the keys for market leadership in the digital photographic area. The other key for this is making its digital cameras increasingly sophisticated, intelligent and easy to use, so as to make it almost impossible to take a bad picture. I think we will see a new laser development utilising some Indigo technology in the future digital printing and multi-function products. While Indigo has been an HP company for some years, up to now it has largely been left alone without HP imposing its structure upon it. There is now considerable co-development going on between HP Labs and the Indigo development group. It is my belief that one of the key areas of development is a replacement liquid toner technology that would be ecologically acceptable in the office space, where the current ElectroInk liquid toner from Indigo is not.

Consumer solutions
Whatever will happen, I don't think HP sees the commercial, direct mail and high performance office and transactional print markets as significant business areas for at least two years. This is the period it will be putting its massive resources into becoming a leading supplier of consumer solutions for entertainment and lifestyle. I do however envisage that by 2008 HP's radar will be directed at high-performance digital printing, possibly using both laser and inkjet technologies. Will that be too late, and will it have become too established a market for even HP to catch up by that time?

Andrew Tribute is a journalist and consultant in digital pre-press and pre-media marketing and technology. Visit: www: attributes.co.uk