The C2424 will be priced at about $3,000 and will be sold through all channels worldwide, including through resellers. It produces color and black-and-white office documents including text files, spreadsheets and presentations at 24 pages per minute. Rise said he expects it to be successful not only for small and midsize businesses, but also for workgroups that are within a larger company.
Xerox is the developer of the solid-ink technology that it uses in its printers. This single-pass printing uses solid, polymer-based ink instead of powdered toner. The imaging process works similarly to an offset press, creating color images by heating ink sticks and applying the appropriate colors to a drum inside the printer and then transferring that image onto the page.
Rise said that the C2424 can be unpacked, installed and in use within about 15 minutes thanks to automated installation of print and scan drivers. "This will make IT happy. It's so easy to administer on a network."
Customers are impressed. "Xerox has changed the way we do business. Their printer has done a lot for us. We were spending a lot of time, money and energy on working with a print shop and now we don't need one," said Jack Hamlett, co-owner of the Mad Science franchise, which helps provide science education to children. "Our office and equipment were obsolete and now we actually could afford to open another franchise."
At Color Sense, Xerox offered education about color printing. From Xerox's Color Studio, Senior Fellow and Manager Peter Crean said Xerox has spent a lot of time researching how to make the screen match what the printer will produce and getting feedback from current customers about their needs.
In a panel about color thought, Jill Morton, a color expert and author of the book "Colors That Sell," talked about why color is so important to businesses. "Color matters because it surrounds us. We are constantly under the influence of color, consciously and unconsciously. Colors communicate. Scientific studies show colors affect us psychologically," Morton said.
Fellow panelist Rick Smolan, the photographer who created the "Day in the Life" photography series, concurred. "There were 140,000 different books published last year so you have a fraction of a second [in a bookstore] to capture somebody's attention. What color you use, how you use it is going to determine your success."
According to both Rise and Crean, this is about affordability, reliability and ease of use. Crean said: "This is a combination of science and art. Part of what we're doing is making color and printing manageable and part of it is to make it meaningful," Crean said. "We see a real spike in interest when the pictures are relevant to you."
According to Xerox, only 3 percent of the total industry pages in businesses today are in color, but the company expects that number to jump to 10 percent by 2008, fueling a $22 billion market.
"The thing holding back advancement in color is awareness," said Ursula Burns, president of the Xerox Business Group Operations. "Most businesses still think it's hard to understand, hard to use, that you need a professional to do a color project. That's not the case anymore."
Also according to Xerox research, companies are spending up to 90 percent of their marketing budget on gaining new customers but are overlooking opportunities to retain them. "By adding color, personalization and other design elements to every document," Crean said, "they're gaining real business results and seeing the rewards of that."
In addition to the C2424, Xerox announced the launch of the Xerox CopyCentre C118 black-and-white copier (starting at $1,499) and Xerox WorkCentre M118/M118i black-and-white multi-function system (starting at $1,999), which is designed for small and midsize workgroups. It also launched the EFI Fiery X12e Color Server for the Xerox DocuColor12 color copier and printer, priced at $8,995. All of the products will be available in early April in North America and slightly later internationally.
Other announcements included the rollout of a new digital color transfer paper, Xerox Digital EA Color Transfer Paper, which can be used for T-shirts, tote bags and mouse pads using Xerox printer products.
