Hackensack (NJ) – Buyers Laboratory Inc. (BLI), the world's leading independent evaluator of document imaging products and solutions, has honored HP and Konica Minolta with "Outstanding Achievement" awards for innovation. HP was honored for its versatile ePrint & Share utility, while Konica Minolta was honored for its universal print driver. BLI's "Outstanding Achievement" awards acknowledge those products in the document imaging market that stand out for their extraordinary ingenuity, usefulness or value.

Winners of Summer 2011 "Outstanding Achievement" Awards are:
    
Hewlett-Packard Company
HP Designjet ePrint & Share
Outstanding Achievement in Innovation

Konica Minolta Business Solutions, U.S.A., Inc.
Konica Minolta Universal Printer Driver (UPD)
Outstanding Achievement in Innovation

HP ePrint & Share Provides Two-Way File Sharing and Printing via the Cloud

A free utility enabling straightforward file storage on and retrieval from the "cloud," and unprecedented sharing capabilities, HP's new Designjet ePrint & Share has been honored by BLI with an award for "Outstanding Achievement in Innovation." HP offers this highly versatile utility at no cost to users who register on the company's Website, after which they have access to 5 GB of secure "cloud" storage. "We stored numerous files in the cloud library and were impressed that there are no restrictions on size or file type. In fact, we even stored and retrieved a file larger than a gigabyte in size without a problem," said Joe Tischner, BLI wide-format printer analyst. More significantly, HP's ePrint & Share can be used to readily share files. To share a file, the user enters the e-mail address in the utility for each intended recipient, upon which the recipients are immediately sent an e-mail alert containing a link to retrieve the shared file. "This unique tool is ideal for architects and engineers, whose print projects are constantly changing. Those changes can quickly be conveyed to teams around the world using ePrint & Share," stated Tischner. A two-way capability, ePrint and Share also enables users of HP's Designjet e-Series of Web-connected wide-format printers to access their cloud library directly from the control panel to print selected documents, "Since there are virtually no size restrictions, ePrint & Share will promote easier and better collaboration by reducing the need for more complicated or problematic file-transfer methods such as via FTP and e-mail," said Tischner. BLI evaluated ePrint & Share in conjunction with the HP Designjet T2300 PostScript eMFP, which was honored with a Summer 2011 "Pick" in the Color Inkjet Wide-Format MFP category.

"At HP, we spent a great deal of time listening to design professionals to determine how we could make the large-format print process easier and allow them to seamlessly collaborate with partners around the world," said Iolanda Montserrat, HP ePrint & Share product manager. "The result of these customer interactions was the HP ePrint & Share Web service, for which we are excited to be recognized by BLI with an 'Outstanding Achievement in Innovation' award."

Konica Minolta UPD Wins Accolades for Ease of Use and Innovation
Konica Minolta has been honored by BLI with an award for "Outstanding Achievement in Innovation" for its UPD, which allows users to easily find and print to a variety of Konica Minolta and third-party printers and MFPs on a network, while offering a consistent driver look and feel.

Because businesses often use a variety of printing devices from multiple manufacturers, it can be a strain on any IT department to keep users' PCs constantly updated with the latest print drivers. With Konica Minolta's universal PCL driver, organizations can deploy a single driver for every compatible printer on the network, saving time and streamlining workers' productivity.

"We've seen quite a few universal print drivers and while they all simplify driver deployment, Konica Minolta's UPD simplifies the process of finding a device to print to in a way we haven't seen before," said BLI Senior Test Technician Tony Maceri. "While many competitors' universal drivers can find network devices of other vendors, the Konica Minolta solution takes this discovery a step further. Not only does the UPD's device list provide each device's status, but it also lets users know whether or not a selected device is compatible with the UPD, saving users the trial and error of sending the job to a non-compatible device only to find out that the job either didn't print or printed incorrectly, ultimately wasting time and resources."

"Konica Minolta is proud to receive BLI's 'Outstanding Achievement' award for its Universal Print Driver (UPD), as this is a wonderful acknowledgement of our development efforts", said Minoru Fukushima, manager, application and platform group, international marketing division. "The UPD is unique in that it takes advantage of the identical printing technology in Konica Minolta's complete office range of multifunctional output devices and supports each product's full functionality, which provides great benefits for efficient output device management. There's no doubt that implementing Konica Minolta's Universal Print Driver helps IT experts significantly reduce administration time and costs -- which BLI has now impressively confirmed with one of its Pick of the Year awards."