For Xerox, the Color of Money ...

Computerworld - ... is color. Xerox Corp. has seen better than 40% growth in unit sales of its color printers and multifunction systems (those that print, fax and scan) over the past 12 months, leading to a 24% profit growth during that period. Not bad for a company whose name is synonymous with black-and-white paper copies. But betting on color's long-term success to continue brightening Xerox's balance sheet has some potentially dark spots. Color printing, while dramatically cheaper than it was only a few years ago, still costs more than the 1.5 cents per page for black and white. So that means businesses will likely restrict the use of color to design-heavy documents and those where color is critical to their communications. There also are technical problems, one of the biggest being color consistency. L.K. Mestha, principal scientist at Stamford, Conn.-based Xerox, explains that even in the best network printers, the color saturation on a page can change in the middle of a print run. So he and other Xerox scientists have invented what they call a spectrophotometer, a device that will reduce the time it takes a printer to automatically check the color consistency on a page from 24 seconds to less than one. The device is beyond the prototype stage but probably won't arrive in printers until late 2005 at the earliest.
Thin clients 'same as Mac' in ...
... penetration of the corporate desktop market. Which is pretty good news for Mike Deneffe, senior director of the Winterm business line at Wyse Technology Inc. in San Jose. That measly 2% to 3% market share is enough to spur Wyse to unleash a handful of thin-client systems in the coming months. Available this week, the Winterm 3150SE and 9150SE offer improved performance over the company's current products, Deneffe says. The 3150SE costs $399 and is the first thin client to ship with Windows CE 5.0, Wyse claims. Priced at $499, the 9150SE will offer Windows XP Embedded as its operating system. Also new is a $349 S-Class device, which is about as big as a VHS videocassette and uses a low-power CPU from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. that lets it run without a noisy fan. It will ship next month running Windows CE 5.0, and a Linux version is due in December. The slightly larger V-Class thin client, using a chip from Transmeta Corp., will also ship in December for $449 with Linux, CE or XPE. Linux "is the fastest-growing segment we have," DeNeffe says.

Wyse's thinner thin client