News Article

Manufacturers Adapt To New ENERGY STAR Imaging Equipment Specification

The new ENERGY STAR criteria for office imaging equipment became effective on April 1, 2007. As we reported in the February 2006 issue of The Business Consumer’s Advisor, the old specification was just concerned with a unit’s energy consumption while in sleep mode. The new, more stringent criteria, in contrast, focus on the energy consumption of office products when they are running during the day.  

We interviewed seven manufacturers (Canon, Konica Minolta, Océ Imagistics, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba and Xerox) to find out what steps they are taking to meet the new ENERGY STAR specification. To gain approval from the EPA for meeting the new criteria, manufacturers collect the data from the products they subject to the new TEC test and submit them using the Online Product Submittal Tool on the ENERGY STAR Web site (www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=OPS). After a month, EPA, in turn, notifies the manufacturer which products have passed the new requirements. While some manufacturers have said that it will be a challenge to meet the new specification, given that EPA expects only 25 percent of imaging products to meet the standard, others have said that they are confident that the majority of their products will meet it. Here’s a look.

Canon  

According to Mario Rufino, assistant manager, environment management and product safety at Canon, the ENERGY STAR program is an integral aspect of Canon’s overall environmental policy. Because Canon was involved with the EPA in the process of revising the specification, it has had some time to prepare for the changes. Three imageRUNNER products, the imageRUNNER 2016, imageRUNNER 5570 and imageRUNNER 6570, and three wide-format printers, the imagePROGRAF 8000, imagePROGRAF 9000 and imagePROGRAF 600, meet the new specification.

While Rufino expects most of Canon’s imageRUNNER products and fax machines to make the cut, he does not expect the company’s scanners to initially meet the new specification. “Our scanners are not currently compliant with the new standard because the hardware changes we had to make to comply have failed to improve the units’ default delay time.” But he noted that Canon engineers are currently working to ensure that all Canon scanners comply by year’s end, despite the challenge of reducing the maximum time (15 minutes) for scanners to enter a low-power mode after no activity. 

Konica Minolta 

Chris Bilello, director of business development at Konica Minolta, said that, with the exception of the bizhub Pro C500 and the bizhub 161f, the majority of the company’s MFP models, such as the bizhub 250/350, bizhub C252/C352 and C550, have already been recertified under the new specification. He noted that the engine designs of the C500 and 161f did not meet the new specification and the company did not want to incur additional costs by reengineering the engines.

Although the company did not have to make any mechanical changes to its products, Bilello noted that the required firmware changes were protracted. “The new TEC test was difficult for our engineers to conduct, involving many steps and requiring a few hours per machine to test. During the test, if the first set of firmware changes did not improve the unit’s energy efficiency, those firmware changes needed to be modified, which required they first pass a quality assurance and quality control process before they were used again during the test.” He noted that the company was successful in speeding up the time required to heat up the fusing rollers, which transfer toner to the page, via firmware, allowing products to recover more quickly from a low power mode. 

Océ Imagistics

Rich Halloway, director of OEM Technology Management and Quality Assurance at Océ Imagistics, said that the products from the Imagistics side of the company, which are manufactured in Japan, already meet the new standard. “At Océ Imagistics, the company manufactures only one ‘box’ for separate markets. It is not economical for the company to produce separate boxes, so the company built machines that could potentially meet, via firmware changes, new ENERGY STAR requirements in the U.S. market, if they were ever adopted.” He noted that the company was successful in reducing the minimum time before the products enter Sleep mode from 10 minutes to two minutes. Some of the data from tested models that Océ Imagistics has submitted to EPA for approval include the fx3000, sx2100, im2330, im4530, im9229 and cm2520 and cm4520. 

Panasonic 

Mark Sharp, group manager, corporate environmental department at Panasonic, believes that Panasonic can meet the new imaging specification, but he said that initially it may be difficult for Panasonic to do better than the 25 percent of products EPA expects to comply. He said that, although Panasonic is committed to the ENERGY STAR program, he is concerned that the EPA has changed the specification to make it more exclusive. “A lot of government contracts, which are the lion’s share of sales for many manufacturers, require the ENERGY STAR label. If EPA expects only 25 percent of products to qualify, does that mean that Panasonic and other manufacturers cannot sell the remaining 75 percent of products to the government?”

Despite the challenge, Sharp said that seven MFPs, all business and six personal fax machines and six scanners now meet the new ENERGY STAR specification. He noted that his colleagues in Japan told him that, to meet the new criteria, modifications to the MFPs and the scanners were the most demanding because the MFPs’ processors and the scanners’ power supply circuits had to be adjusted to be more energy efficient. He also noted that the engineers faced a real challenge ensuring a smooth return from sleep mode without negatively affecting the scanners’ and personal fax machines’ functions.

Sharp

Wayne Myrick, associate director, product safety at Sharp, said that he has submitted data to EPA for 10 MFPs and four faxes. Although he hopes all Sharp products meet the new requirements, he acknowledged that some Sharp products will not meet them. Myrick noted that Sharp had some concerns, which it discussed with EPA and they came to a compromise. For example, the new criteria mandate that manufacturers build their devices (45 ppm and above) with standard duplexing, whereas duplexing was optional with the old specification. “Our initial understanding of the revised specification was that the duplexer could be installed upon delivery of the product. But in negotiations, EPA stated that the duplexer must be installed during the manufacturing. We were concerned because we offer two duplexers, and obviously we could not know prior to manufacturing which duplexer the customer required. However, we reached an agreement with EPA that as long as we included in our documentation that Sharp’s devices [45 ppm and above] required the duplexer to meet the new ENERGY STAR specification, the duplexer could be delivered and installed at the customer’s site.”

Toshiba

Pat McPhail, director of technical services at Toshiba, has been involved in compliance with the ENERGY STAR program since its inception. “The EPA has really raised the bar with the latest revision. It has been a challenge for us to meet the new criteria, but we expect that all our MFPs, except the e-STUDIO520, faxes [the e-STUDIO50F and the e-STUDIO190F] and printers [e-STUDIO205CP and e-STUDIO360CP color printers and e-STUDIO300P and e-STUDIO500P monochrome printers] will qualify under the new specification.” McPhail explained that although Toshiba products have historically entered low-power modes, such as Standby, quickly, the real challenge this time was improving the products’ recovery times from a low-power mode. “Since our products have always entered a low-power mode quickly, we were confident that our products would easily meet the default delay times of the new criteria. But we clearly had to improve our products’ recovery times from low-power modes.” 

Xerox 

The real challenge for Xerox to meet the new criteria was to ensure that its products recovered quickly enough from the lowest power mode, Standby. “For Xerox, the distinctive feature of the new criteria versus the old criteria is that a product must recover quickly from a very low-power mode, such as Standby, using less energy. We had already solved the problem of entering a low-power mode, but this time we had to focus on ways to reduce energy without compromising recovery times,” said Anne Stocum, manager of Environment Health and Safety market support at Xerox.

She said that one solution the company used was to accelerate the warming up of the products’ fusers. “We were able to achieve this solution on two production printing devices, the 100-ppm Nuvera 100 and the 144-ppm Nuvera 144, a substantive and unusual achievement for products in this speed range.” In addition, she noted that Xerox has already received approval for half of its office products, including the Phaser 7760, the FaxCentre 2218, the WorkCentre Pro 232, the WorkCentre Pro C2128 and the WorkCentre M118.

Buyers should note that although EPA eliminated grandfathering from the new criteria, meaning that manufacturers can no longer build products after the effective date of the new criteria and claim that they meet ENERGY STAR requirements, products that were ENERGY STAR qualified under the old criteria are still considered ENERGY STAR qualified.

Go to www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?=ofc_equip.pr_office_equipment to view the types of office equipment that qualify and www.energystar.gov/ia/products/prod_lists/image_equip_prod_list.pdf  to view the products that qualify to date.