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SCMP Reporter

SINCE IBM removed its printer division from the rest of the group, business has improved.

  Under the company name, Lexmark, which has been operating in Hong Kong for three years, it sells the IBM personal printer range through a number of channel dealers, including Jardine Office Systems.

  ''We have about 20 dealers,'' said Sunny Leung, Lexmark's financial director.

  Over the past three years, Mr Leung said the revenue for the company had increased 20 per cent a year.

  Profitability was not public information but Mr Leung said that as with the PC price war, margins on printers had come under attack and the business was increasingly competitive.

  At the lower end of the market, the company offers the IBM ExeJet II 4076.

  A small machine, weighing about five kilograms, it has an approximate monthly printing capacity of 2,000 pages.

  Using standard 300 dots per inch resolution, the printer is much aimed at the small user.

  Its output speed gives three pages in draft mode and only two in letter-quality mode.

  The machine has 12 fonts and all text is printed using IBM's proprietary Print Quality Enhancement Technology (PQET).

  It is a thermal ink-jet printer, not a laser machine.

  On a more business-oriented scale is the IBM 4037 E.

  Like most of Lexmark's printers, it has IBM's PQET technology.

  When this is switched on, the resolution of the print increases to 1,500 x 300 dots per inch (dpi).

  Normal resolution is the standard 300 dpi.

  Although the official specifications give the printing speed as five pages per minute, it is likely to be slower when using the PQET feature.

  In terms of being a workhorse, it does manage a longer duty cycle than many other machines in a similar class, producing about 16,000 pages a month.

  Its buffer memory is 512KB as standard but this can be upgraded to 4.5MB.

  The newest additions to Lexmark's range is the more high volume laser printer in the 4039 family.

       These printers are designed for a multi-user networked environment.

  They also are designed to handle differing personal computer protocols undr a software addition called MarkNet.

  Under PostScript, the units have 39 fonts, under PCL 16 fonts with an additional 14 bit-mapped fonts.

  Again using the PQET technology, the printers give a better resolution (600 x 600 dpi) and without it resolution returns to 300 dpi.



IBM move leads to better results