Lexmark’s New Range Listens To Consumers

A senior U.S. executive of Lexmark has announced that Lexmark’s new inkjet printer range bridges the gap between what consumers really want and what is technologically possibly.

“To find out what our customers really want, we went beyond the usual market research techniques and actually asked our customers [around the world] to videotape themselves in their workstations at home or at the office so we could study them, much like an anthropologist would do. We discovered that complexity of technology, space and time were the main problems faced by customers. One of our Beijing customers actually had his printer perched on top of his monitor for lack of space,” said Vice President of the Worldwide Marketing Consumer Printer Division, Jeff Willard.

In a conference yesterday, Lexmark’s Australasian Managing Director, Graham Kittle added that the new range will further solidify Lexmark’s position in the SOHO market: “NSW has seen a 44 percent increase in the number of home-based businesses from 1999 to 2004. We are continuing to focus on capturing that increasing SOHO market.”

The new inkjet printer range features six new models, four ‘all-in-one’ models targeted mainly at consumers who want to print at home, and two ‘four-in-ones’ targeted at SOHO businesses.

X1270

 The entry level model X1270 ($89) is a printer, scanner and copier offering maximum printing speeds of 17 pages per minute (ppm) in black and white and nine ppm in colour.

 

 

 

X2470

The X2470 ($99) model in the new range is targeted specifically at the problem of space, Willard said, being the smallest all-in-one on the market today. It incorporates direct photo printing – customers can plug their cameras directly into the PictBridge port to print 4 x 6 photos. Print speeds are a maximum of 17 ppm for colour or text documents.

 

 

X3470

With the X3470 ($129) “We are bringing complex technology down to a consumer level, making it easy to use,” Willard said. It has maximum print speeds of 17 ppm and can work directly from a memory card to produce a photo proof sheet of thumbnail images, just like in a photo shop.

 

 

 

One of the neat features of these two printers is the new Lexmark Web toolbar, which allows customers to shrink a Web page to print on an A4 page, print only text from a Web page or only images. Another feature to make scanning easier for home users is that the scanner lights up the corner where you have to place the photo. This is to avoid any confusion about where is the best place to line up a document or photo, to scan.

 

X8350

The top end models X7350 ($249) and X8350 ($349) offer print, scan, copy and fax capabilities with maximum print speeds of 25 ppm for colour. They feature the Lexmark Productivity Suite for photo editing and managing print and electronic document formats. The X8350 also offers six-colour printing.

 

 

 

P4350

Only one of out the six printers in the new range is Mac compatible. It is the P4350 ($179) and has maximum print speeds of 22 ppm in black and 15 ppm in colour. It can print six-colour 35 mm photos and has a built in memory card reader to print photos directly from a camera, without needing a PC.

 

 

 See www.lexmark.com