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5
HP & Lexmark:
New Products and Trends
In October, HP and Lexmark
released a number of new
printers and MFPs. These
releases are very telling about
where the market is headed.
Parts Now! shares our analy-
sis so you can prepare to ser-
vice these new introductions.
HP Trends:
HP continued to follow the
process of introducing a
printer and upgrading it into
an MFP device. This is helpful
to them as it means fewer
SKUs to put on the shelf and
fewer parts to manufacture,
i.e. reduced cost. This should
equate with a cost savings
to all of us. Typically, the
MFP falls into a “serviceable”
price point.
HP also continued the trend
of using series numbers to
group the model numbers.
A good example is the P4015
unit that HP introduced last
February to replace the LJ
4250. This model is a part
of the P4010 series which
contains the P4014 and
P4015 printers and their
variations. If you had visited
HP’s website looking for the
P4015, you would have
struggled to find it. Now HP’s
goal is to direct a customer
to a group of units that fit
their needs. A customer can
compare the P4014 and
P4015 on HP’s website and
make a better decision. In
other words, customers won’t
miss the lower or higher end
models within each series.
You will find that the service
manual is still for the series,
not the model. So either way,
you’ll still have to contend with
knowing both the series and
its corresponding models.
A new trend is a CSR or
Customer Self Repair warran-
ty service program where the
customer replaces warranty
By Steve Geishirt