Get ready for innovation in printing:
HP said the acquisition would help it to "disrupt and reinvent" the $55bn copier industry, a segment that "hasn't innovated in decades". It is buying a big printing presence in Asia, as well as Samsung's laser printing technology and patents. The deal comes days after HP's sister company sold its software business to rising UK tech champion Micro Focus.
[...] Samsung's printer business made $1.4bn in revenue last year and includes more than 6,500 printing patents as well as nearly 1,300 staff with expertise in laser printer technology. Meanwhile, shares in Samsung fell 9% after it urged customers to hand in Galaxy Note 7 phones as they risk exploding.
Also at TechCrunch and Bloomberg.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
HP to Buy Samsung's Printer Business for $1.05 Billion
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 29 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(Score: 3, Touché) by dyingtolive on Monday September 12 2016, @03:28PM
I really liked their laser printers. :(
Also, LOL at HP "disrupting" the copier industry. Yeah, that's what people love when they're trying to print something, disruption. (Yes, I know that's not what they mean to say by it)
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday September 12 2016, @03:38PM
Ha ha. Just after Xerox sent me to HCL, Ursula said that printing was the past. Customers were increasingly looking for ways to avoid printing because it was expensive and bad for the environment. Xerox follows HP usually a year or two later... This should be fun.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday September 12 2016, @03:52PM
Tell me about it... I had an HP inkjet printer in the 90s, just a low-end consumer one, that lasted about a decade (of heavy use) before tearing up. The replacement lasted maybe three or four years. The replacement for the replacement lasted about a year. Now I have an Epson printer. HP makes trash quality products now. Actually, I didn't know Samsung even had printers. They must not sell them in the USA. But I'd never buy anything with the "HP" logo on it ever again.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Informative) by dyingtolive on Monday September 12 2016, @04:03PM
You can get them in the US, at least, around me. Check out the Samsung CLP-415. It's $300-500, but it's probably one of the best printers I've owned. Had the thing about 5 years, and I've had to replace the black once, even with all my friends printing off D&D character sheets and 40k army lists from it.
Fuck HP though. ESPECIALLY their consumer line.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday September 12 2016, @04:43PM
HP's inkjets are trash, but that's because all modern inkjets are trash. Your '90s low-end consumer HP inkjet was a fluke, plus you used it in the only way that makes an inkjet last any sort of reasonable timeframe, which is heavily (most of them get used so infrequently that the problem is that the ink dries out).
HP's laser printers, on the other hand, have kicked ass for decades. I'm sure that there are still LaserJets from the '90s that are still printing dozens if not hundreds of pages per day, with the only maintenance being toner cartridge and drum replacements. I've got a consumer-grade B&W HP desktop laser printer that I bought 5 years ago that's still working fine (even under Linux, which HP officially supports).
I hope that this purchase doesn't mean that the quality of their laser printers will go down. I really don't care what happens to the quality of their inkjet printers as I'm intending to never buy an inkjet printer again.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday September 12 2016, @07:02PM
I got a LaserJet IIP out of the local rubbish dump ("Recycling Centre") about 15 years ago, and cleaned it up. It worked perfectly for 6 years or so until it finally went south. I had to buy a new toner cartridge for it. The guy at the dump took £4 for his favourite charity (beer and snacks IIRC) in exchange for not looking while I put it in my car.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday September 12 2016, @07:47PM
The cheap laser printers as trash now too.
They are essentially a network-attached frame-buffer. (300dpi(squared) X 8.5" X 11"=10.5MB per page (1bpp)).
Why that has to be all secret and proprietary, I don't know. The Eurion constelation [wikipedia.org] may have something to do with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @01:28AM
Up until about 1996 HP laserjets were very decent. Then they went cheap and all in on the ink game. At that point carts lasted about 30-60 days and the printer maybe 1-2 years. Before that you could get a good 10 years out of them and the carts would last until the ink was gone. Usually 1-2 reams of paper. The HP550 was probably one of the best b&w printers I ever owned. It replaced my epson fx80. Which was an 'ok' printer but seriously easy to jam up. After 3 failed HP color deskjets I gave up on them.
Me and some coworkers recently shut down an office. There were about 15 printers. My boss made a point of grabbing one of the HP printers and going office space on the thing. "I have been waiting years to do that to that piece of trash".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @02:29AM
That was the case in early 90s, when laser printers cost at least a grand and HP used to make those rectangular tanks. Anything from latter 90s and on, HP logo means crap-quality shit that make Chinese blush.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday September 12 2016, @07:37PM
Was you 90's HP a 550 or 560? I had the 550 and it gave me years of good service.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:16AM
Actually, I didn't know Samsung even had printers.
They make fairly decent SOHO-grade lasers. Personally I prefer my Kyocera, slap a $20 third-party toner cartridge and some eBayed third-party RAM and whatever into the $50 ex-office-printer I got at a disposal sale and it's perfectly happy, unlike HP's "this genuine cartridge has been used for nearly a year, now disabling it in order to force you to buy a new one" crap.
(Score: 1) by sendafiolorkar on Monday September 12 2016, @04:37PM
Do we really need paper?
Email, servers, data redundancy, smartphones, tablets, cloud(other people's computer)...
Fridges, toilets, seats, cars, waste bins... every freaking thing has a screen now.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Monday September 12 2016, @04:44PM
In the modern world of DRM and takedown notices (and even just the "here today gone tomorrow" nature of the internet), I'd argue that the usage of paper has become less frequent, but more essential.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 4, Informative) by bob_super on Monday September 12 2016, @05:12PM
We need paper because I can't find a cheap e-ink display which would show lots of information at once.
Gimme a tablet with a 15+" e-ink screen, I don't care if it weighs a kilogram. I just don't like to scroll all the time.
(comment typed on a 40" 4K screen)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday September 12 2016, @05:22PM
I'm sad to report the corporate world is still full of "print this out of program A and type it into program B" manual labor. Also at work, training classes and formal presentations still signal how important they are by printing out the powerpoints that'll be tossed out at the end of the meeting. The copier/scanner part of the multifunction device gets used a lot for expense reports, try to scan some useless little piece of thermal paper to get reimbursed for a business lunch or whatever.
At home and at work in areas under my control, I no longer use paper. Its too convenient to carry piles of engineering datasheets or manuals or tutorials on my tablet or phone.
Medical and Medical Insurance racket still rely on FAX. That's incredibly inconvenient. I have to call in favors at corp HQ to email edited pdf files to someone to print them out and feed them thru the only legacy fax machine left in the building so someone on the other side at the insurance company can receive the FAX and scan them in and email them internally for OCR and processing. Sometimes its quicker and less painful to print out and postal snail-mail.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @06:48PM
Government agencies and military use faxes heavily too. Sometimes these are "virtualized" (fax-to-email etc) but not usually.
When I was doing major shipping 2-3 years ago, still needed printing for Bills of Lading and stuff. It needs to be something that can travel with the driver, and when the drivers are often under short-term contracts, need something cheap and disposable. The system that spit these out required dot-matrix printers that were hard to find parts for though; it was working fine since the 80s, and working, so never replaced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @01:59AM
Government and financial forms should be exclusively digital because the ratio of bytes to information is minuscule.
Contrast that with a book that's good enough to reward multiple close readings. Paper is your best bet, unless you're 26 or under and still have hawk eyes.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @06:15PM
Do we really need paper?
Email, servers, data redundancy, smartphones, tablets, cloud(other people's computer)...
Fridges, toilets, seats, cars, waste bins... every freaking thing has a screen now.
The quote I like is that the paperless office is like the paperless bathroom. It's possible, but far more trouble and far messier than you think.
From a philosophical point of view, I don't like the fact that if everybody is electronic then it's too easy for "them" (whoever "they" happen to be) to have ownership instead of you. For example, look what happened with Amazon and the book "1984", where they remotely removed it from all Kindles.
Also, when I'm traveling, I'd rather have some paper printouts which cost a couple of dollars than a multi-hundred-dollar device. If I forget a draft of a paper on a plane I get a bit annoyed. If I lose my $300 laptop then my trip is ruined.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 12 2016, @06:51PM
I don't know about you, but if I read lengthy text on a screen my eyes start hurting. If anything over a page long it important, I print it so I can read it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday September 12 2016, @07:57PM
My pet peeve is that computers are inherently insecure.
Imagine for a moment that you wanted to design a secure computer. Where would you store your correctness proofs?
The solution I am leaning towards is microfiche. It is compact (260 pages per post-card sized sheet), has a long shelf-life (250 years when properly stored), and most importantly: it can be read using optical equipment (meaning I don't need to trust a black-box for reading my correctness proofs).
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:19AM
Do we really need paper? [...], toilets, [...]... every freaking thing has a screen now.
Tried wiping my arse with the screen once. We definitely still need paper.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bradley13 on Monday September 12 2016, @04:43PM
...buy up the competition before you run out of cash.
HP used to make incredible hardware. I still fondly remember the early LaserJets that just would not die. You discarded them only when they were so out-of-date that you couldn't live without the newer features anymore.
Sadly, it has been something like 10 years since HP last produced printers with that kind of quality. Our last three HP printers were crap. One dud we were willing to forgive, two made us skeptical, and the third used up whatever goodwill HP had built up over the years. HP is no longer on our vendor list. That's what happens, when top management scraps quality to boost short-term profits [networkworld.com] - they destroy the business in the long term.
Rather than fix their business, they are going to buy up the competition? We all know what happens then: they drag the purchased company down to their level. Now we'll have to start avoiding Samsung printers as well.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday September 12 2016, @06:12PM
HPLJ4-life
Had one of those plugged into a bad power socket. Ended up grounding through the parallel cable into the PC. PC got fried, HPLJ4 worked fine once it was plugged into a good power socket.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @08:21PM
Apple is about the only consumer electronics hardware company I know that even tries to have a reputation for (relative) longevity these days. The rest seem to go for pump-and-dump. It seems to work for Apple, so why don't more try it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @10:12PM
After all, this is the company that did so great when it decided what they really needed to do was buy Compaq. Right?
It's just the new HP Way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @02:49AM
They used to be at the bottom of the quality pile, now they are a the top. They won a bid against Xerox here at work and they are way more reliable. Xerox still rule the +100ppm market but Ricoh provide better quality and more feature in the medium to large office segment.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathElk on Tuesday September 13 2016, @03:13AM
Two points I'd like to make;
1) the reliable early HP laserjets were actually built around a Canon engine. Anyone who used to bag on Canon LBP then rave the virtues of HP Laserjet were promptly despatched red faced back to the mail room.
2) Fuck printers, send 'em all to hell.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday September 14 2016, @03:14AM
I wonder whether Canon ever stopped making engines for H-P. I found a page from 2009 on which someone said that a Gartner report said
Canon supplies HP with enough LaserJet engines to make it the No. 1 provider of laser printing technology worldwide.
-- http://www.thedeathofthecopier.com/2009/01/canon-and-hp-response-to-ricohikon.html [thedeathofthecopier.com]
An essay by an H-P manager says that the LaserJet 4 was based on a Canon engine.
http://www.hparchive.com/seminar_notes/HP_LaserJet_The%20Early%20History_by_Jim_Hall_110512.pdf [hparchive.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by TGV on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:54AM
And for a measly $3B more, you can also get the cartridge division.