Years after HP 3000 sites reluctantly left their continuous feed laser printers made by HP, a new contender to replace them emerged at the HP World conference. A non-HP peripheral is making a bid to take on the workload of sites printing checks, bills and other documents whose volume won’t let them fit sheet-fed printer requirements.

Output Technology Corp. (www.output.com) announced that its OTC 6500 printer has received the extra engineering to understand commands from HP 3000 applications. These PJL commands aren’t included in other continuous form printers, which prevents the devices from doing page-level recovery and job separation.

“The OTC 6500 is now compatible with the native mode spooler subset of PJL commands,” said OTC product manager Mark Merhab. “This is key for HP 3000 users.” OTC is targeting the printer at the 3000 market’s need for monthly statements and invoices, as well as large volume report printing.

The printer has been on the market for several years, but Ideal Computer Services completed the 3000’s PJL engineering on the printer, Merhab said. “We’d been 95 percent PJL compliant for the last year, and we just finished up some of the last PJL issues,” he said. PJL commands for bin selection and other cut-sheet commands aren’t supported on the OTC continuous feed device, but all others are.

OTC tapped the services 15-year MPE veterans Ideal, who have been supporting customers still using the workhorse HP 2680 printers as well as HP 3000 sites who prefer not to use HP’s support for their 3000s. HP discontinued support on its 2680 line years ago, leaving the 3000 community lurching from one alternative printer to another.

The first replacement was HP’s F100 Series printer, a $250,000 investment outside many companies’ budgets. After HP discontinued its next recommendation, the C30 and C40 cut-sheet devices, it shifted to the HP 5000 D640 laser printers. The D640s boasted a duty cycle of 300,000 pages per month at a $16,000 price tag. Paychecks and other output that had been on continuous forms got shifted by some customers, but others continued to rely on their unsupported 2680s. The D640s had stability problems at first, but the biggest problem appeared to be HP’s unwillingness to stay in the high-volume printer marketplace. HP discontinued the device last year.

The OTC printer appears to offer a real replacement for most of the 2680’s features, except for the largely outdated CIPHER protocol for printing. It offers PCL5e emulation and it’s got a 65-page-per-minute rating and a duty cycle of 1 million pages per month. The base price for the printer is $43,000. OTC estimates that print costs are about a penny per page. Support is $900 a month for five-day a week service, $1,350 for 7x24 service, delivered by IBM Services. HP channel partners quote their own support prices based on those prices.

The OTC 6500 prints on the long side of a letter-size fanfold sheet, but its output can be turned 90 degrees through a command on the printer’s front panel. This gives the same end result of the 2680’s orientation, which was 11 inches across and 8.5 inches down. Reports that are generated are read more like a book, because the perforation is on the side. “People actually like that better once they get used to it,” Merhab said. “It went from a downside on the sale to an upside.”

The printer also uses a more durable printing process, a combination of electron beam imaging with warm offset transfer and fusing technologies. Most laser printers use a corona transfer method, which OTC says uses more toner. Corona type printers use about 80 percent of the toner on the paper. The OTC printer’s process uses more than 99.9 percent of the toner. “There isn’t even waste bottle; it’s just a catch tray that has mostly has paper dust,” Merhab said.

Also, corona-printed materials are less legible in tiny type sizes, and their output can come off with rough handling. Corona wires with electrical charges can’t accept media as thick as the process used in the 6500, or print to metallic stock like parts tags.

The lower-temperature, warm offset process in the 6500 also makes it easier to print on non-paper media, according to OTC. Polyart, a high density polyethylene film with matte coating on two sides, can be printed in the OTC6500. Pressure sensitive labels, tags, tickets and water resistant output are a good match for Polyart.