Printing & Content Delivery
The future of commercial printing is digital — flexible, customized, on-demand. Today, only about 10% of commercial print pages are printed digitally. To grow the market we need to match the quality and cost-effectiveness of traditional printing.
At HP Labs, we’re meeting this challenge by focusing on printing processes and automation. We’re moving from a printer company to a printing company, and our Labs focus on digital print will evolve the printing industry and our market opportunity within it. At the same time, the digital and physical worlds are converging. So we’re building the technologies to smooth the flow of information between them. And we’re automating the publishing workflow process and making it easier for businesses and consumers to publish professional-quality content by unlocking their media assets, wherever they’re located.
Printing and Content Delivery Big Bets
Content Ecosystem
Our Content Ecosystem research creates novel, relevant and compelling content experiences by gathering content from multiple sources (such as content on web pages or photos and videos from smart phone cameras); processing them to extract meaning from the collection; creating high quality publications for presentation and sharing; and receiving personalized content across a variety of devices and formats. We focus on differentiated technologies and cloud services that help people gather, store, access, process, analyze, interpret, share, present and use content to improve the way they live and work.
Document Ecosystem
Documents and the environments in which they are used take on new, richer meaning in the fully-connected, mobile, distributed world. Content exists in electronic and physical form, and must move between these two worlds seamlessly and securely, be accessible from anywhere, carry information about access/usage rights, and enable sophisticated analytics about the content and its use. Our Document Ecosystem research augments and transforms important document workflows, providing seamless connections between paper and electronic forms throughout their lifecycle; real-time adaptable access control; and rich tagging and analytics on all aspects of the content and usage.
Commercial Print Automation
The goal of Commercial Print Automation is to greatly accelerate the ongoing analog-to-digital, and long-to-short-run transformations in the commercial/industrial print industry. By putting new workflow technologies in place to enable efficient, automated, and re-engineered print workflows, we aim to reduce the end-to-end Total Cost of Operation of commercial print publishing systems, driving conventionally-printed pages to digital production and creating new pages that did not previously exist. For example, our Quality Assurance technologies extend the digital workflow across the transformation from bits to atoms, and open the way to monitoring and controlling the downstream part of the digital print workflow. Print quality automation will have a dramatic effect on the total cost of operation for digital print jobs.
Printing Processes for Digital Commercial Print
Our vision is a breakthrough print engine technology platform which accelerates the analog-to-digital transformation for high-value commercial pages. We seek to create a unique combination of low-cost, high-quality attributes not found in any single press process today. Specifically, our goal is breakthrough technology that achieves throughput of more than 1,000 pages-per-minute (ppm) with a consumables manufacturing cost per page lower than the current cost – providing the same high ink coverage, image quality, and media gamut as the best current digital presses – while also reducing its carbon footprint.