Innovative 1" Ink head, Bi-directional Printing Enable Photo Quality, High Throughput And "Less Than Laser" Cost Per Page; Canon Also Premieres New Card- And Label Printing Machines NEW YORK--April 23, 2002-- Canon U.S.A., Inc., a subsidiary of Canon Inc. today introduces two new inkjet-based office color printers that it expects will redefine the market for such devices and provide steep competition to current color laser printers as well as several business inkjet models. The Canon N1000 Office Color Printer, N2000 Office Color Printer and two other print-on-demand devices - the P-660C Card Printing Machine and P-640L Label Printing Machine - will be on display at the Canon Digital Solution Forum and the On Demand Digital Printing & Publishing Conference, both taking place April 23 - 25 at New York's Jacob Javits Convention Center. "The Canon N1000 Office Color Printer and its larger companion, the N2000, are exciting new products that have to be seen to be believed," said Hideharu Uchino, director and general manager of Canon U.S.A.'s Printer and MFP Division. "The combination of rapid throughput, high print quality and low cost-per-page make these printers attractive for many office color applications and we believe laser printer customers will find the N1000 and N2000 compare favorably to their current devices." Two New Printers Use Breakthrough Canon Technology The Canon N1000 and N2000 Office Color Printers employ several revolutionary Canon printing technology enhancements that enable both models to provide impressive speeds of up to 20 pages-per-minute (ppm) in black-and-white and up to 18 ppm in color. A new permanent one-inch ink head allows the Canon N1000 and N2000 Office Color Printers to deliver twice as much ink to the page as existing inkjet devices. This ink head includes 4,480 nozzles (640 for black, 1280 each for yellow, cyan and magenta) and deposits ink in droplet sizes of 30 picoliters (pl) for black and 4 pl for color. The large number of nozzles coupled with the droplet size combines to offer outstanding, photo-quality resolution of 2400 x 1200 dpi for color printing and 1200 x 600 dpi for black-and-white printing. The two Office Color Printers also feature bi-directional printing for maximum speed. Cost Per Page - 'Less Than Laser' The Canon N1000 and N2000 Office Color Printers continue Canon's use of its patented ThinkTank technology, which delivers black, yellow, cyan and magenta in individual ink cartridges. However, these printers go a step further, delivering ink in four oversized ink cartridges, so users get more for their money. The pigment-based black ink flows from a 130 ml cartridge while each color cartridge contains a generous 80 ml of ink - nearly eight times the amount of each color ink contained in many tri-color ink cartridges used by office color printers today. Using an industry-standard 5% page coverage measure, Canon estimates each black ink cartridge will yield 2,820 sheets and each color ink tank will yield 3,470 sheets, with a cost-per-page of $.013 for black-and-white prints and $.049 for color prints. Pages printed by a comparable color laser printer are likely to cost up to $.02 for black-and-white prints and up to $.10 for color prints. Each Canon ink cartridge is also clear, so users can see exactly how much ink the printer has left, even though the Canon N1000 and N2000 Office Color Printers provide users with notices when they have consumed 80 percent, 60 percent and 20 percent of the cartridges' ink. GARO - Raising The Bar In Print Speed Performance Perhaps the most unique feature of the Canon N1000 and N2000 Office Color Printers is the language command set they use to transmit data. Based on the HP-GL Raster Language, Canon has developed an open-architected Graphic Arts language with Raster Operations (GARO) that selects the fastest, most portable, most accurate and most efficient command sets, minimizes overhead in memory and sends data to the printer more quickly than other printers. To demonstrate the efficiency of the printers, Canon U.S.A. contracted with SpencerLab Digital Color Laboratory, an independent printer evaluation facility operated by Spencer & Associates Publishing, Ltd., to conduct an independent test and evaluation of the Canon N1000 and N2000 Office Color Printers. Using actual documents, including professional office and photographic applications from the SpencerLab Printer Test Suite, test results demonstrated that as documents became more complex, Canon printers performed up to three times faster than a comparative product. Spencer & Associates President and CEO David Spencer believes Canon's new print driver and controller incorporating the GARO language is responsible for Canon's impressive throughput. "Canon engineers have done an excellent job developing GARO," Spencer said. "The GARO command set is highly efficient and very well optimized to match the capabilities of the printer engine. The SpencerLab technicians really witnessed the printer's efficiency during the tests we ran, and it is impressive." Configurations The Canon N1000 Office Color Printer is the "A"size and is recommended for standalone applications. The N1000 ships standard with a single paper tray that can handle up to 250 sheets of paper measuring up to 8.5" x 14". Two additional 250-sheet paper trays are available, giving the N1000 the capability of handling up to 750 sheets of mixed media, including plain, letterhead and legal-size paper. The N2000 is the "B" size printer and ships with a single paper tray that can handle 250 sheets of media up to 13" x 19". Both the N1000 and N2000 can be networked, using an optional Network Interface Card, and both printers offer connectivity through either a USB or Parallel port. Both the N1000 and N2000 Office Color Printers will support existing Canon inkjet media, and will also support quick-drying transparencies and new low-cost single-and double-sided glossy paper. Both printers will also feed card stock as heavy as 90-lb Cover, and they are the only desktop printers in the industry to do so.