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RSS feedsWhen the three musketeers said "all for one and one for all", the last thing that they were probably thinking about was the multifunction device (MFD). These devices, designed to provide a range of functions in one box, are the latest development in the office hardware market, and are aimed at those customers with a slightly fatter wallet and a slightly smaller desk than other workers.
Although they only take up the same footprint as a printer, MFDs generally combine three or more functions in the same box, often including fax, scanning and copying capabilities. Also known as multifunction printers (MFPs), these devices sell at a premium thanks to their relative immaturity as a product and their function-packed nature.
Strictly speaking, these machines only need incorporate two functions according to market analyst Romtec's definition, which states that they must include printing capabilities along with at least one of the other functions. These days, most MFDs will include at least three functions, but their most important characteristic is that, because they must include a printer, the ability to connect to a PC is vital.
So who uses these devices? The small business user is one of the main markets, according to Ian Legg, product marketing manager at Canon. Research collected from the company's customers reveals that 70% of the company's MFDs have been purchased by home workers or offices of less than 10 people.
He also believes that end users wanting to replace their existing printers or buy a printer for the first time are being sold on the idea that they could purchase up to four additional functions for just #100 more than the price of a monofunction device. However, Canon's multifunction offering is fairly unique: the starting point for most MFDs is roughly #500, but Canon has squeezed its prices down to #350 for its monochrome model.
Andrew Haji-Hannas, marketing executive at QMS, said that the home market is peripheral to the company's core corporate market. "When we first bought out the products we had problems thinking about the markets to attack," he said. "We thought that it would go into the home market. Companies like Xerox and Hewlett-Packard (HP) thought that too, but they are now rethinking.
"Until we knocked down the price they were expensive, at around #700 for a home user," he continued. "We decided that that might not be the marketplace after all. We decided on another angle, selling to PAs and sales executives."
If that's not enough to confuse you, then make room for Andrew Wheeler, product manager for Oki, who pointed out a new market - the corporate office home office (CoHo) market. This consists of corporate executives working at home who need high-level corporate capabilities to keep them productive. As such, they may have slightly different needs to other residential users who, while also working at home, may not have as high a volume requirement because they are not using the machine as part of a full time job. Tony Trueslove, All-In-One product manager at HP, is aiming at both the home market and the telecommuter markets with his machines.
One concern about these multifunction machines is that putting three or four functions in one box may reduce the quality of each individual function. Trying to keep the scanning input and printed output sharp in such feature-heavy devices is no mean feat for the engineering department.
HP's Trueslove believes that it is an issue for the company to keep its eye on. "It's important that we maintain the same technology as the inkjet printers and fax machines. We need best in class colour printing and all the other benefits of the integration between hardware and software," he said.
Nevertheless, the signs are that the MFD vendor community was not meeting this challenge until recently - and that some still are not, according to Carmel Rowley, director of the Business Equipment Association (BEA), an organisation which conducts extensive tests on MFD equipment.
"One of the main areas we have complained about is manufacturers jumping on the MFD bandwagon," warned Rowley. "We are finding that, in the main, many products are disappointing. There are too many products bolted into a single box and it is too gimmicky." She has even reported a company to the Advertising Standards Association for advertising an MFD that clearly didn't deliver the promised functions.
The quality of these devices is starting to get better, Rowley conceded.
A year ago, she recommended that people stay away from MFD devices, but over the past six months some companies have been producing equipment that has given monofunction devices a run for their money in quality terms, she said.
One of the biggest issues for customers wanting to buy an MFD is the engine type. This can affect not only the quality of the machine's output but also the speed and therefore the unit's ability to process large volumes of paper. When you are considering a device that will handle not only printouts but also all of your incoming faxes, then this is an issue.
You do not want to have to wait for a slow machine to print out a 20-page fax before you can run off the printed report that you have to take to a meeting in five minutes.
One of the oldest technologies is thermal transfer, which uses a ribbon to transfer ink to the page. Unless your paper volume is very low, this technology carries lots of drawbacks. The low capital cost of such machines may be an attraction, but the big disadvantage of using these units is that they often use a whole page's worth of ribbon to produce a page, no matter what is printed on that page. If you receive a blank page as part of a fax, it wastes a lot of ribbon space, and means that the ribbon has to be replaced more frequently. This becomes very expensive.
The most popular technology these days is inkjet, but BEA's Rowley frowns on this printing method for MFDs. She questioned the future of inkjet technology in the MFD arena. "The running costs are so astronomical. Customers are buying machines at cheap capital cost but experiencing a crippling running cost (particularly if they print in colour)," she said. "The quality of the document output is also questionable. Can people really afford not to have their company letters looking as sharp as they could?"
Instead, laser is starting to make an impression in the MFD market. The technology's traditional sharpness and speed makes it an ideal printing method for these machines, although this technology also has its drawbacks.
Canon's Legg believes that colour printing is a long way off in the low-end market. It is currently restricted to the high-end corporate market, where machines cost tens of thousands of pounds.
Even if you choose the right printing technology for you, there are still other dangers when using MFDs. The big worry is that your machine will fail, leaving you lacking four functions rather than just one. If you have a separate fax, printer, copier and scanner, you can at least remain partly productive if one of them fails.
Nonsense, countered Toshiba's product manager Trevor Maloney. "Desktop kit is inherently more reliable. There are slower volumes, slower speeds, no sorters or duplexers to go wrong," he said. "Those products are easier to pack up in a box and send back anyway. With the fax machines we can offer on site maintenance or exchange for a machine."
As someone who has tested lots of different machines, Rowley disagreed.
She said that vendor guidelines on paper throughput are vague in the multifunction market, and because there are so many integrated functions, units tend to be overused. This can reduce the mean time between failure (MTBF), making machine failure a particular issue.
Sending the machine back is not an ideal solution, because end users will not want to be without so many core functions for so long. Nevertheless, if a large percentage of the market does focus on home users as HP's Trueslove and Canon's Legg suggested, the maintenance overhead will be huge. Residential maintenance, where companies are dealing with lots of novice customers in diverse locations, is traditionally an extremely low-margin market, and few companies have ever been able to succeed in competent on-site maintenance.
Users considering buying one of these all-singing, all-dancing devices should also check the upgrade options. A potential drawback of many such machines is that it can often be difficult to enhance one function while leaving the others untouched. Thus, if you are happy with your printing activity but want your scanner to be upgraded to colour, you are likely to have to upgrade the whole device, which dramatically increases the total cost of ownership for your multifunction unit.
On QMS machines, the fax memory is separate to that of the printer memory, so that users can upgrade one part without upgrading the other. However, this only enables you to upgrade the stored sheet capacity, not the DPI, conceded QMS' Haji-Hannas. With Toshiba's devices, users can upgrade the DPI capability via software. Toshiba's Maloney claimed that, even though it is a software upgrade only, it gives true enhanced DPI capabilities.
However, the problem still stands that it is difficult to upgrade the core characteristics of different functions - the speed, the quality, the colour capability - without upgrading everything.
Haji-Hannas explained that his company tailors the devices at source.
"There are differences in certain MFD products. When it comes to the scanning of grey scales, for example, a lot of devices will only be monotone," he said. "You can go into different marketplaces with that sort of capability.
People buying MFDs are looking for different things. People primarily involved in document imaging are looking at the scanning part of the process more than printing. You have to target different products towards different users."
However, this still does not necessarily cater for the changing nature of a user's job, which may required highly localised changes to discrete functions depending on market needs. This is simply something that MFD customers will have to accept.
So, with all these limitations to MFDs, is it likely that the monofunction market will be eroded? No, said HP's Trueslove. "I think that people for whatever reason will continue to buy monofunction machines," he commented. "I think people are concerned about redundancy and what happens when a component breaks. I was at a focus group a couple of weeks ago and that came up as the only issue that a small business could see."
Toshiba's Maloney, on the other hand, forecasts an impact on the monofunction market. The analogue monofunction market for fax machines and copiers will begin to drift as the price difference between digital and analogue product shrinks, he said. However, there will still be some places without a network that will not want the workgroup connectivity options that larger MFDs provide, and they will be happy to continue using PC-based faxing and analogue copying for some time to come, he added. For this reason, he believes the monofunction fax market will not disappear, but neither will it grow at a very fast rate in the future.
Meanwhile, companies continue to rack their brains to try and add more functionality to their already feature-rich MFD equipment. One of the main options is colour faxing, which is in the grasp of the inkjet vendors.
However, a technology standard needs to be attained before this can become possible.
Another barrier is the potential cost of sending colour images down the line. If these obstacles can be circumvented, then it should be possible to introduce colour faxing capabilities - although vendors will have to come up with a way for customers to avoid junk colour faxes, as they will send consumable costs through the roof.
A much weirder idea - and one that smacks of technology for technology's sake - is that of using an MFD for Internet browsing. HP's Trueslove suggests that the fax modem in its devices could at some point be given data capabilities.
Its link with the PC could obviate the need for customers to buy a separate modem as they could browse the Internet using the built-in version.
While this is a clever idea, it has its drawbacks. For a start, it will only be attractive to small business or home users without a LAN connection, and it also means that unless some sort of dual-line capability is installed, users will not be able to receive faxes while browsing, which could be irritating for some.
The MFD market is halfway through its adolescence. It is finding its voice in the market, and some devices are becoming increasingly capable of delivering on their promises as quality increases. Nevertheless, as with most adolescents, there are some problems. A lack of market direction, as illustrated by conflicting vendor views, means that the MFD market still needs a year or two to develop a clear, unified view of where it is headed.
The potential reliability problems may cause concern for some MFD customers, and the nature of the devices means that vendors must craft their maintenance offerings more carefully than ever - yet the signs are that many of them charge premiums for machine swap-outs.
Go ahead and buy an MFD if you think it's right for you, but go along to the vendor with a long list of criteria before opening your wallet.
League Table
The Business Equipment Association conducts extensive tests on multifunction devices designed to measure all aspects of their operation, from Pantone compliancy and durability to the use of consumables.
The results, obtained from printing thousands of test sheets, are summarised into a star grading, where zero stars means that the printer is not recommended, and five stars means that it is exceptional.
This league table lists a selection of desktop MFD devices over a range of gradings. Only one device has ever been awarded five stars by the BEA - the Hewlett-Packard 3100 model, listed in this league table.
BEA 01189 844999 (www.datacheck.net )
an 88% share of the market during April, with the three best-selling products in the MFD space. Canon and Brother offer the fourth and fifth best-selling products respectively.
The gap between the first and second players in the MFD market is immense - at number two ranking, Canon has only 5% of the market. Lake said that much of this is due to market timing and branding.
"HP was one of the first to bring out an MFD product and it has the right brand. It is well known for having this technology," he explained. "It has the Laserjet and Officejet, and it all seems to tie in well. Everyone assumes that when they buy a printer they will buy an HP."
Will there ever be a need to do away with paper output devices altogether?
The technology is there to pass all our documents around electronically, after all, if only we could be bothered to use it. "I don't think that you will ever get a paperless office. When most people receive Email they print it out anyway," Lake concluded. It looks as though paper-based machines, whether multifunction or not, are here to stay.
Analyst view
We all knew that the printer market is dominated by Hewlett-Packard (HP), but many users will be amazed at how far that domination has gone.
Romtec analyst Ben Lake said that HP had an 88% share of the market during April, with the three best-selling products in the MFD space. Canon and Brother offer the fourth and fifth best-selling products respectively.
The gap between the first and second players in the MFD market is immense - at number two ranking, Canon has only 5% of the market. Lake said that much of this is due to market timing and branding. "HP was one of the first to bring out an MFD product and it has the right brand. It is well known for having this technology," he explained. "It has the Laserjet and Officejet, and it all seems to tie in well. Everyone assumes that when they buy a printer they will buy an HP."
Will there ever be a need to do away with paper output devices altogether?
The technology is there to pass all our documents around electronically, after all, if only we could be bothered to use it. "I don't think that you will ever get a paperless office. When most people receive Email they print it out anyway," Lake concluded. It looks as though paper-based machines, whether multifunction or not, are here to stay.
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