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Looking to universal wireless cameras, printers

Wireless isn't the key, but it's an essential part of HP's plans to make life easier for amateur digital photographers, once the right standards exist, says a senior VP of the New HP.

"Image-rich communications, connecting everybody to any event, will be the trend of Hewlett-Packard's imaging business over the next three years," warned HP's Bernard Meric - senior vp of imaging and printing group in EMEA region - at an Executive Business Summit in Fiuggi, Italy, today. Mobile connectivity will drive the market, he said.

HP is talking in a language which followers of Steve Jobs at Apple will recognise - the language of a "digital ecosystem." But where Jobs is talking about the overall "home data entertainment centre" including PC and set top box and PDA, HP is more focused on imaging.

"How do we connect all these things?" asked Meric, offering the tantalising dream of being able to link any printer to any camera, any scanner to any computer.

HP Instant Share is the latest actual product to attempt this. It allows the amateur photographer to specify what they want to do with a picture; whether it's an emailable (small) file or printable, or uploadable to a Web site - or even a slide-show onto CD, with music.

The plan, or the dream, however, lies in developing universal standards so that a camera owner can simply print, on any make of printer, any picture they took on any make of camera. And wireless linkages, Meric hinted, will be one way of simplifying this.