Once back to present, mister Thierry Bagnaschino (the marketing director of the LP&VI department) shared some interesting information with us. For example, one third of total net income of Epson comes from the Old Continent. Since 2004, Epson has been the absolute No. 1 when it comes to A3 scanner sales, and No. 2 in business colour printers' sales since 2005. Epson seems to invest a lot in the Research&Development sector lately, as they registered 8200 patents solely in 2007. They recognised the growth of the business printer market and have decided to concentrate on it this year.

Further into the presentation, Epson representatives discussed many topics. One of the more interesting ones are latent expenses. For example, you bought a single printer for your office fulfilling the needs of three employees. Everything is working nicely, they are printing their documents, wait for a little bit, have a chit-chat... However, add one person to the equation and, with a little maths, you will easily deduce that the printer user is waiting for its printed material for too long, i.e. the working hours time spent for him/her to wait for the print is more expensive overall than a single new printer and the accompanying cost of print. They stressed the need for careful printing analysis on the workplace itself, especially in major corporations. They also mentioned a few of their major clients, such as the Italian NBL bank, which switched to cooperation with Epson and reduced its printing costs significantly, while the first year of Epson printers' implementation decreased failure rates due to human errors from 20% to 10%.

This brought us to the very essence and reason of our meeting. Epson decided to unveil two new printer models targeting the business market, B-300 and B500DN, which should hit the market during June. These are ink-jet printers meant strictly for business sectors, offering a low print cost, print quality comparable to that of a laser printer, and finally, robustness in spite of the huge rate of print. We were initially quite sceptical about this, but as soon as we moved on to the demo room, our doubts were gone. What both models have in common is that there is no warm-up time, so they can provide the first page from the stand-by mode directly in only 3 seconds. The expected price of the B-300 in Europe is around the 245 € mark (VAT not included), which is rather cheap for the performance it provides. First of all, this printer can easily provide 10.000 pages per month. Colour cartridges have mammoth capacities – 3000 pages of black&white print and 3500 pages of colour print. They are all separated so that you can change them as needed, and the expected cartridge price is 40-50 €.

The more expensive model (a recommended price of 425 € + VAT) is more robust, since it is certified to 20.000 pages per month with a printing speed of 37 pages per minute (the same speed as the previously mentioned model) or 33 pages per minute if the high-quality, “laser-like” mode is selected, no matter whether you are printing black&white or colour material. A speed as high as this was achieved by improving the already efficient Micro Piezo printing head. Alongside the increased size of 20x20 mm, the process now requires significantly less passages to print a page. The head possesses the Auto Nozzle Check system, which enables location of a specific choked nozzle and un-choke it using the difference in electric charge. Perhaps the most important aspect is the total consumption, which Epson managed to keep very low. According to the company's officials, a single colour page costs only 2.5 cents to print, and while the competition can only offer black&white laser-printed pages at that price, the new Epson printers print black&white material at 0.6 cents per page! We also found the new 220 ml cartridges impressive, as they make previous ones look like toys, so we are prone to believing Epson officials, at least until we test the new models ourselves.

Epson really had a lot to say, and the new business ink-jet printer concept seems promising. Expect more info as soon as we receive these ones and have them tested.