Xerox Corp on Monday introduced the first products in a new series of network printers, designed to combat Hewlett-Packard Co’s dominance in the desktop and workgroup marketplace. Xerox says it intends to become the fastest-growing player in the printer and digital document products arena, which it reckons will be worth $54bn by 2000. The first product announcement concerned the DocuPrint N32 Network Laser Printer, touted as the first 32-page-per-minute office printer selling for less than $3,000 at $2,900. Xerox says the N32 is 33% faster and about $500 cheaper than the closest comparable offering from HP. Xerox also introduced the 24-ppm DocuPrint N24, which should go for about $2,450 – 30% less than its HP counterpart. The new printers are based on a Fuji-Xerox engine and support all major network environments and operating systems. Base models offer a 12Mb memory, which is upgradeable to 128Mb. Adobe PostScript and a built-in ethernet connection are also standard. Xerox says it also has long-life toner cartridges which offer 53% more prints at an average cost of about $0.01 per page. The first units will ship by the end of October in most parts of the world. The new products will be sold through indirect channels, such as computer dealers, resellers and retail superstores. Xerox plans to aggressively market the products through a multimillion dollar print and television ad campaign directed at the small-to-midsize business market, which Xerox feels it has pretty much missed until now. The company is hoping that it can quickly gain ground with these buyers by offering unique, high-performance products at favorable prices, although cracking the stranglehold that the HP brand has had for so long, will be no easy task.
