New 2012 HP monitors and printers
Besides laptops and desktop computers, HP has also announced a couple of new accessories, composed of mainly printers and monitor displays.
- First off is the HP Officejet 150 which is a mobile all-in-one printer/scanner that comes with a 2.36 inch touchscreen battery and lithium-ion rechargeable battery that’s good for printing up to 500 pages. The HP Officejet 150 All-in-one will be available for $399 in June.
- The other printer is a more generic ‘sit on the desk’ model: The new HP Photosmart 5520 all-in-one printer supports Wireless Direct, which means printing over the internet via your PC or Apple iOS devices that support AirPlay. It will be available in June for $129
- HP has two new entry-level business class monitors. Both the Compaq L2206tm and Compaq LA2405x monitors have 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution, 2 USB ports, VGA and DVI outputs, 72% color gamut, 250 nit brightness and wide viewing angles (170 degrees horizontal, 160 degrees vertical). The difference? Compaq L2206tm is a 21.5 inch touchscreen monitor that will be available July 4th for $279 while the Compaq LA2405x sports a plain 24 inch non-touch display and adds Display Port connectivity and it’s available now for $269.
- There are also 3 HP displays for the retail and enterprise market. The new displays are the HP L6010, L6015tm (15 inch) and L6017tm (17 inch), with the latter two have multitouch displays which are projected capacitive, which means just bare touches are needed to use them.
HP 2311xi display
And finally, HP also had a consumer monitor to unveil this week. The new 23 inch HP 2311xi display is an LED backlit IPS monitor which promises wide viewing angles (178 degrees vertically and horizontally), vivid colors and brightness of 250 nits. The HP 2311xi has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 (Full HD) which is great for watching movies and inputs for VGA, HDMI and DVI-D. It will be available starting June 24 for $240.
Ideas for future HP monitors
Being the proud new owner of a used HP ZR24W business monitor and having seen the peaked interest in the recent months about HP’s (future) monitors from reader emails, there are a couple of ideas I’d like to list down for my ideal ‘next’ monitor, hopefully from HP (since I do like their no-nonsense mostly all black with some silvery accents industrial designs)
- HD webcam: This is probably the number one most wanted feature for HP’s business monitors since they pretty much lack any sort of webcam (including that very recently announced ultra-thin one); if you’re shopping for a consumer class/Pavilion monitor, not to worry, since those monitors have webcams already. It may seem like no biggie at first, like what I thought, but soon it gets a little tedious to lift up that laptop display to use its webcam (or purchase a dedicated webcam; the cheap ones are a little too pricy for what they are, that you’d rather go with a higher end HD one, which can rack up $50-$100 of additional cost over the monitor).
For the sake of catering to security and privacy concerned corporations, HP should make HD webcam equipped and webcam-less variants of future monitors. HP already does this webcam/no webcam thing with their EliteBooks, so it’s not going to be something they haven’t done before if they choose to do that with their monitors.
- Backlit monitor buttons: Yes, for Mac users, our monitors still do have buttons and for all the right reasons too. I’d like them buttons to still stick around (instead of going the route of buttonless monitors) but this time, make them backlit. They really come in handy when using the monitor in total darkness, which a surprising number of people do, especially those who work with photos and videos.
- LCD custom preset profiles: A couple of monitor user-customizable profiles would be very nice indeed throughout the product range. If you use your monitor from very early in the morning till late at night, you’re bound to have come across the annoyance of having to lower brightness and contrast so it won’t kill your eyes (unless you work in a windowless room all day long). And with pairs or trios of monitors becoming increasingly popular nowadays, it can be a chore to adjust the brightness and contrast of all monitors together… even a button that toggles between two modes (which for me, would be ‘day brightness’ and ‘night brightness’) would be really helpful and better than nothing.
- Pop-up Night Light: Since not everyone has a fancy backlit keyboard (or wants a fancy backlit keyboard), I think having a HP Night Light on HP’s dedicated monitors would be a very nice touch, especially for desktop users (the backlit keyboard of the HP EliteBook laptops also don’t work when the laptop’s built-in screen is powered off). Since there’s more room to work with and no need to make desktop monitors portable, they could do up a multi-position (and perhaps swivel enabled) Night Light so it can illuminate the keyboard below the monitor, while doubling as a webcam light when needed.
- USB 3.0 ports, all of them! I think this is pretty much self-explanatory.
- SDHC/SDXC card slot(s), maybe Compact Flash and CFast too. Panasonic is already doing it with their televisions, I’d say HP should include media card readers in their monitors! Some folks really would appreciate one or two of these slots since they work with multiple memory cards; it could also substitute or completely negate the need for a dedicated card reader (Which adds yet another peripheral device to the desk!)
- Bonus: Built-in low voltage processor and WebOS: Well, we all heard about HP wanting to slap WebOS on potentially everything in the future. They have WebOS phones, WebOS tablets, WebOS printers… I think monitors are next. If they integrated some very low voltage processors with WebOS (Think one of those dual core 1.2 GHz processors found in the HP TouchPad), which shouldn’t be too hard, one can use the monitor for web surfing or in Exhibition mode when not attached to a computer. Now THAT’s an idea!
HP Mini Wireless Keyboard
In the crowd of notebook, desktop, WebOS and various announcements of 2010, HP has quietly sneaked out their Mini Wireless Keyboard. The HP Mini Wireless Keyboard is a compact keyboard without a number pad, geared at home theater PC and desktop owners. The direct competitors to the HP Mini Wireless Keyboard which I could find include the Microsoft Arc Keyboard, Verbatim Mini Wireless Slim Keyboard and the Apple Wireless Keyboard.
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HP Mini Wireless Keyboard with EliteBook... review coming soon!
The HP Mini Wireless Keyboard: I’ve been using this little thing for awhile now with my EliteBook. It comes in handy a bunch when I hook up my notebook to an external monitor and need something to type on… but sometimes I bring it out for fun since it’s portable and slim enough to be use on the go. More on this home/media center suited keyboard later this week when I post a full review…
HP USB Graphics Adapter
Ah the HP USB Graphics Adapter… Let me first mention how delighted I am to have found something like this exists. Here’s the thing: I have an HP EliteBook 8740w that I will have to return in the long term and unfortunately for me, and since beggars can’t be choosers, the one I have here has the older generation Nvidia Quadro FX3800M graphics. And as I recently discovered… well, actually I knew it was gonna happen but I was just wishfully hoping it wouldn’t be the case… that the Quadro FX3800M does not support more than two displays at any one time.
So I found out about adapters that use the Display Link interface. The DisplayLink certified display comes under all sorts of different names, from the HP USB Graphics Adapter to Kensington Multi-Display Adapter, but regardless of name, they basically do the same thing: USB connector at one end, DVI port on the other, and it allows you to hook up an additional monitor to your computer. This really helps if you have just one external monitor port on your computer and/or have a graphics card that cannot support more than two displays at one time (typically, you need an AMD/ATI 5000-series graphics card or higher, or Nvidia mid 2010 model graphics card or newer)… you can finally add a third monitor to your laptop or basic desktop setup, or even six, if you have enough USB ports and CPU horsepower.
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