For, while the new hardware represents the company’s big guns in terms of fire-power aimed at capturing more of the market, there’s nothing big, physically, about these new machines, which are noticeably more compact than earlier models. Smaller, smarter and sexier, in fact.
One of Brother’s most eye-catching models is the MPrint MW-260 portable USB printer. Weighing just 550 grams and small enough to be easily held in one hand, the Bluetooth device is also infrared-enabled. Designed to print on A6 paper (one-quarter the size of an A4 sheet), the tiny printer is aimed at those who need to be able to output receipts or labels on the go. But is there a viable market for such a niche product that clearly cost a lot to develop? As with viewers following Big Brother on TV, it’s a question of ‘wait and see’.
Brother has brought up the big guns in its battle to capture a greater share of territory in the printer market. No longer content to be little Brother, the Japanese manufacturer recently unveiled an impressive armoury of hot hardware.
In preparation for what will be a fiercely contested struggle, the company has armed itself with new fire-power in the form of its own colour engine, marking a departure from its previous reliance on the technology of other manufacturers such as Hitachi.
At the vanguard of Brother’s market assault is a range of new colour laser models set for launch in March.. However, Brother’s campaign goes well beyond printers and multi-functional devices (MFDs). In addition to spending EUR * 600 million in its effort to capture a significant slice of the world’s laser printer business, the firm is moving into virgin territory by developing technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID), power over Ethernet (PoE) and even retinal imaging display (RID), a technology that uses laser light to project virtual images directly onto the retina of the eye, one pixel at a time, thus making viewing screens obsolete.
Brother’s representative director and print and solutions company president, Toshikazu Koike, said: “The next three years will see significant investment in colour laser and inkjet printing aimed at the European small business market, plus the home, corporate, industrial and professional sectors”.
Koike pointed out that the firm had puts its money where its mouth is by making a 46 per cent increase in its R&D funding. “Brother is confident of its new technology, and we expect our product range to gain it 10 per cent of the colour laser printer and MFD market in Western Europe.”
Colour laser accounts for 15 per cent of the print market worldwide, and European sales of colour laser multifunction devices are projected to grow 90 per cent this year while sales in colour laser printers is set to grow 10 per cent.
Clearly, the trend is towards MFDs, where a single machine prints, scans, copies and, in some cases, also faxes documents. Brother’s new range of machine is no bigger than a small desktop photocopier. Yet, for companies and for individual buyers alike, the MFD promises a lower initial spend, lower maintenance costs, a much smaller physical footprint, and fewer cables cluttering the work space. For home users and small businesses, the advent of the MFD has brought industrial-strength technology at affordable prices. And at a time when home networks are becoming increasingly common, all Brother’s new gear is network-enabled.
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