HP offers $599 color-faxing device
The company's latest all-in-one offering allows a user to fax or email color images and documents from a PC.
The Office Jet Series 700 line of products combines a printer with a copier, scanner, and fax machine and allows users to email or fax scanned color images and documents directly from their PC.
Though the new line provides sending of these color images, there's a catch: To send and receive a color document via fax, both the sender and the receiver must have a color-fax-enabled machine, and right now only HP offers one.
"The idea of color faxing is cool, but there are a lot of limitations to it," said Gary Peterson, an analyst at ARS. "The biggest limitation is that [the HP Office Jet Series 700] is the only machine in the world that offers it."
While HP concedes that no other vendors offer machines with color-fax capability right now, the company argues that anyone with a PC and a color printer or scanner can see the output of a color fax sent from an Office Jet 700.
"This is about color communications," said Bernadette McBrearty, future product manager for HP consumer products. "Eighty percent of users we talked to are interested in color-fax capability."
Still, anyone with a fairly recent email program can send and receive color documents, although McBrearty argues that color fax is more immediate and secure than email. "Depending on how it is routed, email is not as immediate as fax," she said.
The new line consists of the Office Jet 700 and 710, similar products priced at $599 for the club and retail channels, respectively. The 720 can make 99 copies at a time, store up to 65 pages to fax, and offers an additional software package for Microsoft Office 97, for $629.