Fuji launches global printer

By Adam Gifford

New Zealand needs and conditions have been taken into account in a new breed of colour laser printer and copier being launched today by Fuji Xerox.

The input has come from Clive Dagley, who was seconded for the past two years from his role in the New Zealand office as digital office products business development manager to work with the Singapore-based development team on the DocuColor 1250.

Mr Dagley said the new printer was the first true technology leap since 1992 when Xerox launched the Majestic printer, which introduced reliable connectivity.

The 1250 was the company's first truly global printer, he said.

Part of the work of the Singapore team was to suggest features to the Fuji Xerox engineers in Japan, and to win support for those enhancements from the United States-based Xerox Corporation and Xerox Ltd, which covers Europe.

A new feature of the 1250 is the ability to print full-bleed A3. This means printing on oversized paper to 305mm, which can then be trimmed to 297mm, with the colour going to the edge of the page.

The facility is not used much by the Japanese market nor the United States, which uses multiples of "letter sized" or quarto, but it is of immense value to printers in this part of the world.

Other features Mr Dagley successfully lobbied for include bigger paper trays and the ability to use thicker grades of paper. The DocuColor 1250 will take up to 256gsm card, sufficient for most business cards.

This is likely to be an important source of revenue for the copy centres and commercial printers at which the machine is targeted. It will print colour at 121/2 pages per minute (ppm) or black-and-white at 50ppm, and will cost between $70,000 and $80,000. Colour printing will cost about 32c a page for A3 and 30c a page for A2. The machine includes a high-quality A3 scanner.

"The reasons people would not take digital printers seriously before was the image quality was not good enough," Mr Dagley said.

We've increased the resolution by 50 per cent and changed things like the toner not adhering to the paper properly so it couldn't be folded, or image buildup so it did not have flat-ink look."

The most significant technical advance which contributed to the improved image quality is the intermediate belt transfer. Instead of being passed through the machine four times to build up the colour layers, the colour goes on to a belt which transfers the complete image in one pass of the paper.