The State of Copier R&D

[mjarbar]

Re: The State of Copier R&D

What goes into a new copier:
-How much does it cost to produce?
-How much can it be sold for?
-How soon to upgrade to the new models?
Technician are rarely considered anywhere in the R&D process. Being technicians, we all know it creates issues, but since when did manufactures care about what techs think? This trend seems to be getting worse. Faster, cheaper, and a shorter lifespan.

Sharp released the Aries and Virgo not even a year ago, they are on version 7 firmware, and are getting ready to release new models already. 7 versions of firmware in the first year shows that there is no R&D, simply bean counters.

Someone posted a great video about "planned obsolescence" a few weeks back; a must see.

This is a very good thread and I thank the starter and all those who have contributed to it.
However, I do not agree with the notion that we service/field techs are not thought of or taken into consideration during the R & D process. This would be detrimental to any serious manufacturer as far as the working life of the equipment is concerned,& bad for business! That is why the manufacturers usually 'go the extra mile' to prepare the service & repair manuals and indeed other resources to be used by us the techs to backup the working life and performance of their equipment which they release onto the market.
_ The only problem for us is that the pace of the technology development is so rapid that many completely new products using novel design features are being developed almost every year! This poses a real challenge to us the techs, since to keep abreast of this technological advancement or progress, one needs to undergo constant training and re-training. This is very costly in terms of resources including time, both for the techs & the dealers. Many techs in one way or the other are unable to keep up with this pace. This impacts negatively on their career!
- Otherwise, the digital copier/ MFP technologies is the best thing to ever come in the pint Image Industry. Constant Study, training and re-training is the only way out for us. This field is becoming increasing Academic! 'DO or DIE!'.

Both of these posts make correct and valid points but I also think there is a factor of the "one up-manship" of one competitor against another. All the companies be it Canon, Ricoh, Sharp or any other all try to maintain a competitive edge over their rivals to build or maintain marketshare, as a result the cost and development time factors creep in and we as techs end up with a machine that we either pm every 6 months / 500k clicks or whenever the thing decides to break down.

If a company decided to step back and say "we aren't releasing a machine till it is perfect" they would suffer a large financial loss that would be very hard to claw back.

I first came across the planned obsolesance vid a while ago. If you do a search for BBC5 there are a lot of vids on there about all sorts of subjects not usually reported on in the press.

[Yeeter]

Re: The State of Copier R&D

Hello,

I spent 10 years with HP designing next generation inkjet printers. I get the point of this post, and its valid. Yet there ARE reasons.

First off dont forget, ALL technical problems have an economic component. Does the world really need another printer design? Not in the fundamental sense, yet there is a market for improved performance. And at the macro level there has been some evolution over the years. Inkjet came in and opened a consumer world. The industrial inkjet has been on a tear with advancement over the last few years. Color laser technology has caught up to the PQ of inkjet which swings the market back that way.

For certain usability and service is taken into consideration during the design. Of course there are a lot of tradeoffs, and to remain competitive on price while maintaining profitability (without which none of us would be employed) means getting something to work while satisfying the constraint set.

On a consumer inkjet printer the entire paperpath cost budget is a few dollars (think less than $10). Imagine what it takes to get a piece of paper, that the engineer doesnt specify or control, to position to the accuracy of a machine tool with just a handful of cheap stamped/molded parts. We just didnt believe it was possible to do it, yet each generation of printer was incrementally better.

Then it reaches a point where the product commoditizes and purchasing decisions are made primarily on cost/price. Design efforts are to incrementally improve performance while reducing cost. Its pretty remarkable how these systems work. And yes, a much higher performing longer lasting system could be built - but they are not built that way simply because the market for it would be relatively small.