Hewlett-Packard Co, whose rival Canon Inc had a ten-month head start with its own product, has just launched a new color printer-copier-scanner for small businesses. Hewlett-Packard is also touting the OfficeJet Pro 1150C as the cheapest multifunction product in its class at $1000, but the equivalent Canon MultiPass C2500 retails at around $600 and has desktop faxing capability thrown in also. Hewlett-Packard only offers this as an option at extra cost, along with the choice of monochrome or color scanning. Despite lower margins in the personal multifunction products segment, as Dataquest Inc calls it (CI No 3,102), Hewlett-Packard says it is sticking to the low-end, as it already has an offering for the high-end, corporate customer in its Network Connect product. The machine implements Adobe Systems Corp’s Photo Delux Image Editing software and Caere Corp’s OmniPage LE optical character recognition software to convert printed text into electronic form. The OfficeJet Pro 1150C is compatible with Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, but not MacOS, because the company wants to hit the majority of the small business market, it says. Market researchers Giga Information Group Ltd claim the worldwide market for multifunction devices will have reached $10bn by 1999, and Hewlett-Packard says it expects to be a significant player.
