If you're short on floor space and need a printer, a fax machine, a copier, and a scanner, then you're a likely candidate for the Swiss Army knife of office machines: an MFP (multifunctional peripheral). Often called hydras, these multiheaded printers are growing in demand in the SOHO (small office/home office) market--or anywhere you need a single peripheral that can do it all. MFPs represent the inevitable evolution of the SOHO printer market--the convergence of office peripherals--because scanners, copiers, printers, and fax machines all use similar paper-marking engines.
During the early 1990s, most MFP products were fast, expensive machines aimed at the high end of the market, but in 1994, on
e-stop peripherals with affordable prices emerged for the SOHO market. BIS Strategic Decisions analyst Barry Tepper reports that you can purchase Hewlett-Packard's top-selling OfficeJet for $795, while a plain-paper fax machine, an ink-jet printer, and a personal copier cost more than $1000 if you purchase them all separately.
Notable printer vendors, such as Canon USA, Okidata, QMS, Ricoh, Toshiba, and Xerox, offer hydras of varying stripes. The HP OfficeJet is a monochrome DeskJet ink-jet printer with a 9600-bps modem; it can also scan and fax documents.
Toshiba's TF505
, a $2399 4-ppm laser printer, also serves as a scanner, a plain-paper fax machine, and a copier. To print documents on the TF505 from a PC, you must install Toshiba's Windows-based ImageVision III Print Manager and connect the TF505 to a host system with a bidirectional parallel cable.
To push the MFP market forward and to obviate the need for proprietary interfaces, the MFPA (Multifunction Printer Associatio
n) is promoting support for its MFPI (Multifunction Peripheral Interface). Completed as an interim standard in February, the MFPI standard provides a nonproprietary API for controlling MFPs. The proposed international standard is tailored to be compatible with Microsoft's proprietary MAW (Microsoft At Work) standard and is based on a similar concept, but Microsoft has yet to embrace MFPI. It is also questionable whether Microsoft is actively supporting MAW anymore. Novell reports that its set of technologies called NEST (Novell Embedded Systems Technology), for controlling peripherals on a NetWare LAN, will be compatible with MFPI.
photo_link (21 Kbytes)
The Toshiba TF505 is a small printer that also has the ability to handle scans, copies, and faxes.
Multifunctional Peripherals
