1998: High Throughput and Ultimate Image Quality

In January of 1998, I was at an HP press event in Dublin with Antonio Perez, GM of HP's inkjet business. Antonio had asked me to do the technology evangelism part while he and others made the executive vision and marketing pitches for press members from around Europe. When of the nice things about doing European press events was that HP also felt the need to hold the events in places that would be interesting to Europeans.

Antonio I were sharing a car and driver en route to a business dinner (at the Jameson Distillery) when Antonio's boss and mentor, Rick Belluzzo, called to say that he was leaving HP. That news left Antonio visibly shaken. Rick was essentially the No. 2 person at HP, and Antonio's career was linked to Rick. It was my first encounter with executive "politics" at HP, and the resulting organizational changes would lead to new opportunities for me later on. With Rick gone, HP CEO Lew Platt decided to have the major HP businesses report to him. Antonio was running the $8B inkjet business. Carolyn Tichnor was running the LaserJet business. The competition between them created an unstable business climate for HP's printing customers. I'll say more on this later.

The Dublin event was just the first of many in a busy year for technology evangelism. Along with Rob Beeson from my team, we covered quite a few events in 1998. It was a 75K+ flight miles year for me. Here's a snapshot:

1/98 - HP Dublin Inkjet Conference (Smouse) - 100 European journalists

1/98 - West coast PC labs tour (Smouse, Ward/VCD, C&B)

3/98 - IT Strategies/IMI Large Format Conference in NC (Smouse)

3/98 - HP APD Bootcamp in Vancouver (Smouse)

3/98 - GIGA European Inkjet Conference in Dusseldorf (Beeson)

4/98 - Japan PC labs tour (Smouse)

4/98 - IMI Inkjet Conference in RI (Beeson)

5/98 - HP Barcelona Leadership Conference (Smouse)

5/98 - IS&T PhotoImaging Conference in Portland (Smouse)

5/98 - HP Budapest Small Business press event (Smouse)

5/98 - Conference on Image Science & Hardcopy in China (Beeson)

9/98 - International Congress on Imaging Science in Belgium (Smouse)

At HP, we believed and had convinced many people that the following was true:

• The combination of speed, performance and print and image quality are really far more
  relevant measures of printer performance than DPI.
• The best measure that reflects the ability of a printer to simultaneously deliver both IQ and speed is -- total drops-per-second capability of a printer. This measure should replace dots-per-inch (DPI) as the new metric for printer comparison.
• Drop volume is an indicator of image quality but does not reflect the potential impact to speed. Rapid delivery of a large number of very small drops is the key to simultaneous achievement of print quality and speed - hence the need to measure total drops-per-second.
• High quality printing at faster speeds will be achieved by delivering large numbers of very small drops - this is a key advantage for HP and TIJ.

We came up with this graphic to show that HP's existing TIJ was already the superior printing technology.

What we weren't yet saying openly outside HP was that the potential for even smaller drops, higher TIJ firing frequencies, much higher nozzle counts and far more color layering capability for what we considered Ultimate Image Quality (also the name of a 1998 task force that I had been asked to lead).

Now it was time to deliver results for HP and for the broader transformation of photo printing to digital technology. Toward that end, my team had a highly innovative and productive year working on various parts of what we called the Gutenberg program. The goal was to create technologies to enable high speed photo printing using an array of TIJ nozzles spanning the entire width of a page. This required many firing chambers and nozzles with very small drops firing at extremely high speeds. It also required innovative methods for ganging sets of smaller printheads together into printbars with the right electrical and fluidic plumbing and with proper alignment and nozzle redunancy to avoid visible defects and artifacts on printed pages even when images were printed with a single pass under the page-wide printing arrays.

I'll skip the myriad details of how my team and the rest of our Section and Advanced Research Lab delivered on this potential along with many other HP partners. The bottom line is that we did deliver on the promise.

My Writing Systems Research team generated many patents during these years of innovation. I took the point of view that I should only put my name on a patent when I had a significant contribution and when the patent was for a foundational concept. Three such patents were granted: US 6554399,   US 6394579, and US 20020118254.

In 1998, innovation was truly alive and well at HP, and the inkjet business was allowed to keep profits and reinvest in building teams of brilliant technologists and in creating new markets.

Next: 1999: Change and Opportunity