e-Print is that the new revolution to sweep the printing world : What’s e-print all about?

Posted 527 days ago 1 Comment by Jason S

A few days back I was lucky enough to attend the launch of HP’s e-Print technology and also the new line-up of printers that support e-Print at Hong Kong(Courtesy: HP IPG group). Well, the entire unraveling was kept in wraps till the D day of 29^th June 2010 – when it was officially unveiled for the JAPAC(Japan and Asia-Pacific) region at the world famous D Shaw studios in Hong Kong.

Getting back to the point, e-Print is simply a new revolution and thinking, an out-of-the-box approach employed by the leader in Print Technology – HP. In simple words, it’s gonna be as easy as sending an e-mail to your printer (yes – I did mean your humble printer) and it prints the document, photo or whatever that is printable. Now dwelling back into the finer details of it – this new approach makes printing possible over the cloud. Though there has been a lot of buzz over Cloud computing / Cloud services /Cloud storage and what not – we now have Cloud printing in the form of e-Print.

e-Print enabled printers can be connected to the internet and also registered over the HP’s dedicated website at HP ePrintCenter . Once registered online, you have an option of getting an unique e-mail address for your printer. That opens up a world of possibilities to you – send an e-mail over to it or better still a word doc or a pdf (one of the many formats supported currently) and the job is almost scheduled/printed in a few seconds. Seconds rather than minutes and that too without any hassle of wires and drivers and what not to take care.

This truly helps when you want to print from non-conventional devices such as your mobile or iPod touch or even the latest iPad. All of these devices willnot allow you to natively print to a printer, hence you were always forced to get the document over to a PC connected to a printer and then print it. Now all that will look passé since all that you need for printing is just gonna be able to send an e-mail which all of these devices support.

There are very interesting possibilities that open up with this new technology. Your grandma who has no idea of how to use a computer can now get photo prints of your trip abroad in a few secs – if you happen to setup an e-print enabled printer at her home and load it up with photo paper. One of the best gifts that you can give her, don’t you think?

All this time we were looking at the rosy picture of e-Print and all that it can do for you – now lets checkout some of the not so rosy stuff.

Energy – yup, the first thing that struck my mind was how energy efficient is this whole setup? This is an era when we buy flight tickets and donate a portion of it to offset the carbon footprint we have left behind, when we are so much conscious about the environment (and we should really be). We are talking of a printer that is 24×7 on and connected to the internet. However energy efficient these devices turn out to be, yet there is going to be wastage of power and other resources.

But for now I am really pleased at the brand new and bold approach employed by HP – this is truly going to be an Out-Of-Box innovation in Printer’s which were almost becoming redundant with many of us harboring a school of thought that printed matter is no more needed when you can carry all that digital data with you anywhere and everywhere. But we must realize that this is not always true – atleast for the foreseeable future. The airlines still need you to have a printed e-ticket so are the Multiplexes. Best of all, your mum / dad or granny will any day prefer a printed photo of your trip than the digital format.