Since the merger of Konica and Minolta, we have focused on creating new value in 'Digital Print'

Tell us about Konica Minolta's transformation story—from where it began and where are you today?

Konica Minolta has a great legacy of two powerful brands that have dominated the markets and have established reputations as innovators and as leaders in the market since inception. The brand has won the confidence and trust of people for generations and this is what the Konica Minolta brand continues to evoke in the mind of its customers. Since the merger of Konica and Minolta, we have focused on creating new value in 'Digital Print'. We are happy that we have become one of the largest providers of digital printing press in the world and currently have the largest installed base in India.

What are the offerings in your portfolio presently?

At present, we offer color and monochrome digital producting printing presses, Multi-functional Printers (MFPs), 3D industrial presses, amongst others. For education sector, we have introduced cloud computing software EDUCO ERP.

What are your latest innovations?

The new bizhub MFPs comes with embedded Near Field Communication (NFC) for Android devices and bluetooth Low Energy (LE) for iOS devices that automatically connects user’s tablets or smart phones and provides the convenience of touch-to-print as well as touch-to-scan functionality. The use of NFC and bluetooth LE also allows for the unique and industry-first feature of having embedded authentication function using mobile devices as security tokens through these technologies, ie, touch-to-authenticate.

Tell us about the life of printers?

Like any other product, printers are designed to meet the demands of various segments. For example, it is used from home users to product printing presses. The life of the products too is factored based on this. Generally these are designed to have a life of 3 to 5 years.

What is the difference between new-aged printers vs traditional printers?

All our latest MFPs have a large multi-touch color display akin to a tablet interface with support for many finger gestures such as pinch-to-zoom, swipe and drag providing for a richly interactive solution interface. Added to the cutting-edge display and UI all the new devices are compatible to cloud and mobile printing support for several industry standards such as AirPrint, Mopria, and Google Cloud Printing, etc, right out-of-the-box. The PageScope Mobile App for smartphones and tablets is available for Apple iOS, Android & Windows Mobile platforms with print and scan functionality, added to which is the bizhub Remote Access app to control the MFP panel from any iOS or Android tablet.