Uxbridge, Middlesex-based Rank Xerox UK, supplier of document-based products and services, has just announced the UK launch of its new 600 dots per inch medium-speed Xerox 4650 laser printer, the first 600 dpi model from Rank Xerox. This new model was launched earlier this year in the US and Europe, and is alleged to be doing particularly well in Germany, Sweden and Holland. The Xerox 4650 is capable of producing up to 50 pages per minute – according to Paul Maxwell, product manager for Rank Xerox, this is the first professional printing system of its kind to offer near-typeset quality at such high speed, setting new standards in high-quality laser printing. Rank Xerox, claimed to be the market leader in electronic professional printing, doesn’t feel that it has a particular rival in this field – while Hewlett-Packard Co offers a 600 dots per inch desk-top printer, Rank Xerox considers this too specialised to pose competition. Xerox claims that its 4650 has been designed to meet the increasing on-demand requirements for quality electronic print in two main areas: data centres and in-house print departments and electronic publishing services.
Land Rover
The new printer is fully compatible with existing Xerox equipment and can also be used off-line with other systems such as IBM, ICL, Unisys and Bull mainframes and DEC minis, and it offers features such as duplex printing, portrait and landscape printing, electronic forms creation, printer storage for forms, graphics, fonts and logos, and two input trays and two output bins for continuous operation. Come November, Rank Xerox UK hopes to offer an option for an additional two input trays and also for an on-line stitcher which will staple booklets together as required. The Xerox 4650 system incorporates resident fonts at 300 and 600 dots per inch, which are designed for data centres and dedicated publishing environments. To increase throughput speed, the font memory can be expanded up to 128Mb and the graphics memory to 256Mb. The Xerox 4650 also has an expandable hard disk capacity of up to 1.1Gb. The anticipated applications of the new model include the printing of catalogues, formal documents, technical manuals and price lists. Land Rover – yes, the maker of those sturdy motor vehicles – is backing the new launch – apparently Land Rover is seeking to shake its macho image and wants to project itself its new four-wheel drive Discovery as a vehicle for the sophisticated and Rank Xerox has come to the rescue with its new piece of printer technology, enabling Land Rover to produce an upmarket manual with 80% graphics through it. The new Xerox 4650, available from Rank Xerox’s usual sales force, costs UKP117,500 for on-line configuration, compared with the standard 4050 model, which costs UKP100,000, and instead of a per page usage charge, it carries a standard monthly printing charge of UKP900.
