HP
The printer company crashes the party
HP
There is no HP chapter in the 1990s edition of this magazine, because there was no HP copier to review. HP is, as far as this register is concerned, the newest member of the family — and the only one who joined by acquisition rather than invention.
HP’s copier-class story doesn’t start with a copier engine at all — it starts with the LaserJet, the desktop laser printer line HP had been refining since 1984. For three decades HP was content to be the world’s A4 printing giant while Xerox, Canon, Ricoh, Konica Minolta and the rest of this register fought over the office copier: the A3, walk-up-and-scan, service-contract machine. HP simply didn’t have that engine, and building one from a standing start is a decade-long, patent-thicket problem. So HP bought one.
On 12 September 2016, at its Global Partner Conference in Boston, HP announced a definitive agreement to acquire Samsung Electronics’ printer business for $1.05 billion — the largest acquisition in HP Inc.’s history at the time, bringing roughly 6,500 print patents and around 1,300 Samsung print engineers into the fold. The deal closed on 1 November 2017. The stated target, in HP’s own words, was to “accelerate disruption” of the $55 billion A3 copier segment. HP hedged the entry with two engines rather than one: the Samsung-derived laser line, and PageWide, its own stationary-printhead inkjet technology, both reaching A3 office price lists between late 2016 and mid-2017.
The industry took the ambition seriously enough to try to buy the company outright. Xerox Holdings launched an unsolicited exchange offer on 2 March 2020 valuing HP at roughly $24 a share — $34.9 billion — then withdrew it three weeks later, on 31 March 2020, citing COVID-19 market turmoil after HP’s board had repeatedly rejected the approach as undervaluing the company. It is a strange loop worth sitting with: the old copier giant tried to swallow the new copier entrant less than three years after that entrant had bought its own way into the copier business.
The two-engine bet resolved on 20 July 2021, when HP discontinued the entire PageWide office range — A3 and A4 — citing shrinking cost and footprint gaps between inkjet and laser, and choosing to reinvest in LaserJet instead. Existing customers were promised five years of parts and supplies support, a tidy way to close out a wager that didn’t pay off. The Samsung-derived LaserJet Managed A3 line became HP’s copier-class spine outright, and has since gone through a full platform refresh into the current E7xx/E8xx generation reviewed on the facing page.
HP — The Range, 2026
| Model | Year | PPM | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| LaserJet A3 MFP launch wave (13 models) | 2017 | 25–60 | First fruits of the Samsung deal; superseded by current generation |
| E78625 / E78630 / E78635 (E786 series) | current gen. | 25/30/35 | Mid-tier colour A3 MFP on the Samsung-derived engine |
| E786z (Managed Flow) | current gen. | as E786 | Adds HP Flow document-capture workflow to the E786 platform |
| E87740 / 50 / 60 / 70 (E877 series) | current gen. | 40/50/60/70 | Plate No. 17; top of the colour A3 range |
| E877z (Managed Flow) | current gen. | as E877 | Flagship colour A3 with advanced scan workflow |
| E72425 / E72430 | current gen. | 25/30 | Entry A3 mono MFP, 1,140-sheet standard capacity |
| E72525 / 30 / 35 | current gen. | 25/30/35 | Mono counterpart to the E786 colour tier |
| E82650 / 60 / 70 (E826 series) | current gen. | 50/60/70 | Mono flagship of the range, up to 70 cpm |
| Color LaserJet Enterprise MFP 5800dn | 2024 | 43 | A4 departmental flagship; HP markets it as “AI-capable” |
| Color LaserJet Enterprise MFP 5800f | 2024 | 43 | As 5800dn, adds fax |
| PageWide A3 office range | 2016–17 → disc. 2021 | 40–80 | HP’s inkjet answer to the laser A3 copier; withdrawn from sale |
The gatecrasher’s decade
HP entered this register the way most late arrivals do — by buying someone else’s decade of engineering rather than living through it. Within six months of the Samsung deal closing, thirteen LaserJet A3 MFP models were on price lists at 25–60 ppm; the E877 series now tops that lineage at up to 70 ppm, a speed genuinely competitive with the copier-class machines this magazine’s 1990s edition reviewed without ever mentioning HP once. The industry noticed the ambition, too — Xerox’s counter-bid, three years later, is the tell.
The engine bet that lost
HP hedged its entry with two engines rather than one — the Samsung-derived laser line, and PageWide, its own stationary-printhead inkjet technology, both reaching A3 office price lists between late 2016 and mid-2017. Running two print technologies in parallel is an expensive way to learn which the market prefers, and on 20 July 2021 HP learned it: the entire PageWide office range was discontinued, cost and footprint gaps to laser cited as the reason, five years of parts and supplies support promised to existing customers. HP’s A3 office push today is entirely the LaserJet line the Samsung deal built.
THE VERDICT — HP
Arrived to the copier party three decades late, wrote the host a cheque for $1.05 billion, and is still working out whether one engine was ever going to be enough.