Canon Brings Its Fastest A4 MFPs to Market
By Carl Schell, Associate Editor, September 30,
2011
Earlier this month Canon introduced the imageRUNNER
1700 series, a move that represents the manufacturer’s initial venture into the
high-end A4 MFP space. While Canon’s current imageRUNNER 1025 family satisfies
the office needs of smaller environments, these six new devices include a major
subset of A3 functionality in an A4 footprint, be it on the desktop or as a
console, to fulfill business demands in larger settings—even enterprises. First
presented in prototype form at the Canon EXPO in New York City in September
2010, the imageRUNNER 1700 series will be a boon to dealers, too, as they look
to secure more MPS contracts. Said Brad Arrington, manager of product marketing
for Canon U.S.A.’s Imaging Systems Group, “We carefully watch and study
customer trends, one of which is the rising interest in monochrome A4-class
MFPs. Canon listens to our customers and sales channels, and factoring in the
increasing importance and growth opportunity of MPS, we believe now is the
right time to introduce this new product to strongly address the market need.”
The manufacturer’s strategy surrounding the family
encompasses several planks. “We aim to provide a low total cost of ownership
for our A3 systems, and that same value proposition is clearly at the forefront
of our A4 messaging—excellent acquisition cost for the features they provide
and favorable operating costs,” he said. “Our design approach to improve
maintenance, by using separate toner and drum components instead of a print
cartridge, and having a long-life drum, also contributes to a lower TCO. The
devices are compact: They’re ideal for verticals such as healthcare and legal,
where space matters, but we think they can fit into any market, horizontal or
vertical. And the series is easy to use and manage, delivers the kind of image
quality and features that people expect from Canon, and helps us make our
portfolio that much more complete.” On the footprint front, BLI’s database
shows that, indeed, the devices are among the smallest in this class.
The family comprises the imageRUNNER 1750
(52 ppm/$4,200 SRP), 1740
(42/$3,200), and 1730
(32/$2,200), each with an “iF”
configuration that has standard PCL 5e/6 and PostScript 3 drivers, the
out-of-box ability to create searchable PDFs, and a single-line fax. Color
Send, which is simplified scanning functionality compared with the more
feature-rich Universal Send, and the proprietary UFR II LT driver come with all
the devices. SRP for the “iF” versions is $800 higher than their base model
counterparts.
Arrington described the manufacturer’s decision to use
one of its engines, rather than go the OEM route, as a no-brainer. “Canon has a
legacy of building its own technology and design, investing up to 10 percent of
revenue in R&D,” he said. “For this new series, we leveraged the A3
copier-based platform of the imageRUNNER 2500 family and then streamlined the
footprint to achieve a more compact model.” For instance, the A4 imageRUNNER
1700 series has less-robust finishing, though an optional finisher that staples
up to 50 sheets in one position is available. The devices aren’t open
architecture-enabled, either, unlike many competitive devices, but “when we
talked to our customers, that wasn’t a big concern of theirs,” he said. It
bears noting, however, that the devices have embedded uniFLOW support in the
firmware (for the optional server-based output management solution, as well as
the Serverless Secured Print solution), and are compatible with imageWARE
Remote and imageWARE Enterprise Management Console, two of the manufacturer’s
MPS tools.
A couple of other factors helped make Canon’s decision
to launch the imageRUNNER 1700 series easier. As Arrington said, “First, print
volume on MFP-based products is growing, with the migration from single-function
printers. Second, the trend we’ve seen is that businesses are switching from
being self-managed entities to MPS subscribers. These are two tremendous
opportunities—they’re different types of market share. We understand that some
other traditional copier vendors arrived in this high-end A4 MFP space before
we did, but we’re not looking to benchmark our success against theirs. Our goal
is to provide faster, more dependable A4 MFPs that can seamlessly replace a
fleet of single-function printers or supplement an existing fleet of Canon A3
devices, hopefully in environments that have an eye toward MPS.”
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