In his introduction at the HP press conference at drupa, Vyomesh Joshi the Executive VP of HP's Imaging and Printing Group stated that HP would be entering the 'Light Production' market. This is an area of the graphic arts market where HP has no products at this time. Its HP Indigo products are full production level systems. The 'Light Production" area is one that has color printers and Multi-Function Printers (MFPs or what we used to call copiers) that print at speeds of up to 70 pages/minute and cost under $60,000. The main players in this space are Konica Minolta, Ricoh and Xerox and it has proven to be a very major market area for these suppliers. Canon also works in this area but its current products are sold more into the office market.

Mr Joshi or VJ as he is known, indicated that the products for this area from HP would be built using HP's Edgeline inkjet technology. These inkjet heads are used in a range of products today from a photo kiosk printer, the 8050/8060 MFP, the new wide format printer using HP Latex inks and the HP Inkjet Web Press. VJ indicated that at present he has a team of people assessing the market needs for a Light Production product but gave no date when such a product would be available. There is no indication at this time of what the specification will be or what price the product will sell for. At drupa HP is showing output from the 8060 MFP and discussing what are the needs for its future product. I would expect some of the technologies developed for the Inkjet Web Press in areas of nozzle redundancy and building wide print width arrays to be incorporated in the new product.