HP Redefines Printing with Net-Connected Printers

Print It From Anywhere

How would you like to share documents by having them printed out directly on your recipient's printer without having to go through an intermediary machine like the PC? How would you like to have your favorite newsletter printed out directly from the web? What about accessing your cloud storage directly and have your documents printed without using a PC? Or scan documents directly from your multi-function printer and store them in the cloud, so you can have them printed or accessed wherever and whenever?

Now you can with HP's revolutionary new range of printers that will allow the device to connect and print content directly from the internet. 

The concept behind these new printers is very simple, if you can email it from any device, you can definitely print it on the printer. Taking the PC out of the equation, HP is reinventing the way how people can print to their printers by using a simple tool such as email. 

When you purchase any of these new web-connected printers from the store, the registration process will assign a unique email address to the printer. By simply sending an email to the printer's email address, HP takes the PC out of the process by spooling the print job in its own ePrint servers and have the printing data (PCL data) delivered to the printer via the email protocol. This means that you can print without the need for any tedious printer driver installation.

The motivation for such devices are driven by the explosive growth of the internet and the increasing use of mobile phones to create and share content. With the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and cloud services such as Google Docs, users can now take it a step further by printing them easily from mobile devices such as a smartphone or a tablet like the iPad. 

ePrint and Apps

The HP ePrint platform is somewhat like a large email server that receives files from users who want them printed on their web-connected printers. The ePrint server is a print spooler that processes all the files for printing and it sends these processed PCL data to the web-connected printer. Upon registration, each printer is assigned a random email address of 14-16 characters long with a mixture of numbers and letters. The random nature of the email address is to prevent email spammers from guessing your mailbox name. It would've been a bad idea if your printer begins to print a load of junk emails without your supervision.

The HP ePrint centre setup also allows one to further secure your web-connected printer by whitelisting and blacklisting email addresses. In this way, the user could control and grant permissions to print only when it receives files from certain email addresses. 

Even without any blacklisting or whitelisting of email addresses, HP's ePrint centre would have had its own spam filtering software that scans, detects and eliminate any suspicious content from reaching your printer.  But if all else fails to block those pesky spammers, one could always opt to regenerate a new email address.

Printing via email is only one of the ways one can print with HP's latest range of printers. These new printers also come with an intuitive TouchSmart display panel that lets you print content pulled directly from the web. The panel runs a suite of downloaded apps that lets you connect to popular sites that delivers content directly to your printer. News, photo albums and even entertainment sites like Dreamworks provide endless updated content which one can access on the panel and have it printed without a PC. 

By allowing apps to run on a printer, HP is building an entire app store ecosystem, much like how Apple and the rest of the mobile platforms are doing it today. With a revenue share model of 70/30 which is similar to what other app store operators are based on, HP hopes to tap on the developer community to help it define new usage models of these web-connected printers. 

At launch, users can log on to HP's ePrint centre and download whatever apps that fancy them. But if you're a developer, an SDK can be downloaded for free and you can start developing your own apps. 

For now, the  app platform on the printer is based on the Linux operating system although it would have been pretty cool if it were to run HP's newly acquired Palm WebOS. However, that is not completely ruled out and the company has plans to utilize the power of WebOS to its fullest extent in the near future.

Meet the New Photosmart Printers

At the launch today, HP introduced a range of Photosmart printers targeted at home users who want the freedom to access content and print anywhere using email. Later in the future, HP plans to extend the ePrint service to printers targeted at small businesses and the enterprise.

Four printers are launched today :-

• The HP Photosmart Premium e-All-in-One - this top-of-the-line printer features wireless access to the web and features a 4.3-inch HP TouchSmart screen. This printer is capable of two-sided printing, thus helping users reduce paper usage. This printer will be available in October 2010.
• The HP Photosmart Plus e-All-in-One - Also available in October 2010, this printer is capable of producing lab-quality photos as well as documents. It comes with a smaller 3.5-inch HP TouchSmart screen.
• The HP Photosmart Wireless e-All-in-One - The most affordable printer in the range, this printer comes with an integrated wireless connection and features individual inks. This will be available next month (July 2010) for only $199.
• The HP Photosmart Premium Fax e-All-in-One - Besides printing photos and documents, this printer lets you fax, scan and copy using its built-in automatic document feeder. It also incorporates both wired and wireless networking and will be available in September 2010.

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