The Scanners and Printers That Could, From HP

Posted on July 26th, 2012. Written by Rico.

Turns out you could scan a printed spreadsheet and save the output as an editable Excel file on your PC, as HP demonstrated during their launch of the Scanjet 7000 s2 and 8500fn1, as well as the Laserjet MFP M525 and M575, for the Philippine market.

As “enterprise-class” products meant for high-volume office use, the four devices have the price tags to match. In many ways, the hardware built into them justify the money local businesses are expected to pay. The Scanjet Enterprise 7000 s2, the smallest of the bunch, can scan an entire double-sided page full of graphics within a second or so. It’s bigger brother, the Laserjet Enterprise 500 Colour MFP M575 (whew) also triples as a full color printer and photocopier.

However, the secret sauce that makes them work is the accompanying software. Aside from turning printouts into editable documents through the good old OCR, the included software also auto orients and straightens crooked scans. Even more useful from a business standpoint, the software can also separate documents based on the barcodes it detects on the paper it processes.

The M575 and its monochrome brother the M525 also take networked printing to its logical conclusion, through their support of HP’s access control print server. It’s yet another way the HP offers more functionality through software. The ideal scenario: users send their print jobs to the server, walk up to any HP printer connected to the server and retrieve their jobs for actual printing.

As everything’s network-based, that situation could apply to an employee preparing documents in his company’s Manila office, then print out the pages themselves at the New York branch. So long as the printer he’s using is connected to the company’s server, retrieving, managing, and printing out jobs would be possible.

But how would the printers know who’s using them and which jobs to retrieve? Both the M575 and M525 can support the same access cards employees use in many offices, if the appropriate card reader is connected. Retrieving jobs thus becomes a simple matter of tapping the access card on the reader. The pending jobs linked to the employee’s account then appears on the Laserjets’ LCD screen, allowing the user to select jobs for printing and deleting.

This built-in support for user identification also allows businesses to limit printer access. They can even set rules on printer usage, such as a 5PM cutoff. And like any decent authorization system, different functions can be made available to different users. Executives for instance could use the Laserjets’ USB port to print out their documents from flash drives, but not staff.

The HP Scanjet Enterprise 7000 2s, Scanjet Enterprise 8500fn1 Document Capture Workstation, Laserjet Enterprise 500 MFP M525 Series, and Laserjet Enterprise 500 Colour MFP M575 Series aren’t available at your neighborhood gadget store. HP Philippines prefers you contact them directly for availability and pricing information. After all, with the functionality these four devices offer, only businesses (both small and large) will be able to maximize them.

Interested parties should contact Bea Aldeguer at +639175901270 or isabel-beatriz-garcia.aldeguer@hp.com for more information.