Separately, Hewlett-Packard Co is today expected to offer a new family of multifunction hard copy devices, a laser printer that will slash the cost of printing in colour, and a mid-range color scanner. The multifunction product family for the home office combines printer, facsimile, copier and scanner capabilities in one machine, and will cost $550 to $600. The new HP Color LaserJet 5 is claimed to bring near-photographic colour print quality at a new low cost per page. The company told Reuter that for a black-only page with 5% coverage, the Color LaserJet 5 costs 1.8 cents a page, against 2.5 cents for a monochrome laser printer. A full color page is less than the same document on a black-and-white unit. The ScanJet 4p Color Flatbed Scanner fills the gap between its ScanJet 4s personal desktop scanner at $300 and ScanJet 4si unit at $1,000. It costs $500.
