HP Touts Its Image in Ink Sector
RANCHO BERNARDO, Calif. — In the photopermanence room, behind massive steel vault doors, racks of special fluorescent bulbs bombard rows of photographs with intense light.
A month in the vault mimics 12 to 13 years in the real world and helps scientist Nils Miller develop printer ink for Hewlett-Packard Co. that keeps snapshots bright and colorful.
Images of grinning gap-toothed kids abound at Miller's tightly guarded lab outside San Diego, but this is serious work: A big chunk of HP's profit comes from printer ink, and the computer giant is determined to protect its dominance in the $4-billion U.S. market.
So important is ink to HP that the Palo Alto company today plans to roll out a new brand -- called Vivera -- that it hopes will make customers think about what's pumping through their printers the same way chip maker Intel Corp.'s Intel Inside campaign made them think about what's powering their personal computers.
Bolstered by a hefty advertising campaign, Vivera ink will be sold to flow through 13 new printers for the home and small office that will be introduced as part of what HP calls Big Bang 3, a lineup of products the company plans to put on store shelves before the end of the year.
Before the ink could dry on HP's news releases, however, rival Lexmark International Inc. revealed to The Times plans to market its own branded ink, Evercolor. Although Lexmark is a distant second to HP, it's gaining ground, thanks in large part to its exclusive partnership with Dell Inc., the top PC seller.
The branding efforts by HP and Lexmark are similar to Eastman Kodak Co.'s marketing of its Kodachrome color film and Tri-X black-and-white film.
"One of the challenges is that printer makers have got to keep moving," said Martin Reynolds, a senior analyst with Gartner Inc. "Otherwise, people ask, 'What's the difference?' "
Plenty, according to HP, Lexmark and even the venerable Consumer Reports magazine.
The magazine this year conducted a test comparing inks from name-brand manufacturers such as HP, Seiko Epson Corp. and Canon Inc. with generic ink. Its conclusion: "It almost never pays to buy off-brand ink cartridges."
That was no surprise to Pradeep Jotwani, HP's senior vice president for imaging and printing supplies, who said inks were developed for specific purposes such as printing text or photographs, and that entire printing systems were built around them.
