Colouring the corporate world: a sluggish start

Colour printers will not become a permanent feature in the workplace until the cost and technology make them more user friendly, according to Paul Curlander, CEO and chairman of Lexmark.

Speaking exclusively to Silicon.com in an Agenda Setters interview, Curlander claimed it would be another three to five years before the corporate world used colour printers.

"The future of printing is colour, everything in the home is colour capable. In the office it is a different situation, if you look at all the office paper printed out in the last year then out the three trillion printed, only one-tenth of the one per cent were colour.

"There are lots of reasons for this but the technology is just not there yet and won't be for another three to five years before colour is a permanent feature," he added.

He said colour printers were slow compared to monochrome printers - capable of only three to four pages per minute as opposed to 17 to 20 pages for black and white printing.

Curlander also talked at length about the impact of the Internet on the printing business.

"What you really see from the Internet is another printing driver, separate from email or messaging which just allows people to communicate, you now have the ability to research huge amounts of information and unless you have an amazing memory you will need to print it off," he said.

You can watch the full Agenda Setters interview with Paul Curlander in the Document Management Channel (http://www.silicon.com/a35493 ).