Canon U.S.A. introduced the newest member of its multifunction printer family and price reductions on two current models today.
The MultiPass MP 390 is Canon’s new mid-range MFP, said John Lamb, the company’s senior marketing manager. It will ship in several weeks with a $199 suggested retail price. It features full printing, scanning, fax and copying capabilities with print speeds of 18 pages per minute for text and 12ppm for color. Other features include memory card slots and PictBridge printing.
To make room in the MultiPass MFP family for the MP390, Canon is reducing the price on the MP360 and MP370 models. The former will list at $129 with a $30 rebate and the latter will have a street price of $149.
These price moves herald the start of what could be many price cuts the MFP category will see this year, Lamb said. Lamb expects other vendors to make cuts and the entire category to become very competitive as the year moves along. He said vendors will start pushing feature sets in order to gain customers and this trend will spill over into the stand-alone inkjet printer market.
Lamb believes the printer category will continue to lose share to MFP, but companies will continue to make improvements in order to keep the business from falling to far behind. This will probably include adding more portable models, pushing print speeds, adding direct printing and improve color capabilities.
