TECHNICAL
HP & Lexmark:
New Products and Trends
In October, HP and Lexmark released a number of new printers and MFPs. These releases are very telling about where the market is headed. Parts Now! shares our analy- sis so you can prepare to ser- vice these new introductions.
HP Trends:
HP continued to follow the process of introducing a printer and upgrading it into an MFP device. This is helpful to them as it means fewer SKUs to put on the shelf and fewer parts to manufacture, i.e. reduced cost. This should equate with a cost savings
to all of us. Typically, the MFP falls into a “serviceable” price point.
HP also continued the trend of using series numbers to group the model numbers.
A good example is the P4015 unit that HP introduced last February to replace the LJ 4250. This model is a part of the P4010 series which contains the P4014 and P4015 printers and their variations. If you had visited HP’s website looking for the P4015, you would have struggled to find it. Now HP’s goal is to direct a customer
By Steve Geishirt
to a group of units that fit their needs. A customer can compare the P4014 and P4015 on HP’s website and make a better decision. In other words, customers won’t miss the lower or higher end models within each series. You will find that the service manual is still for the series, not the model. So either way, you’ll still have to contend with knowing both the series and its corresponding models.
A new trend is a CSR or Customer Self Repair warran- ty service program where the customer replaces warranty
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