HP tries resuscitating plummeting printer sales with AI-enhanced printing features — Perfect Output helps trim web pages and combines data

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Including HP Print AI and Perfect Output

Before and After HP Print AI on some spreadsheet info
(Image credit: HP)

On September 24, during HP Imagine 2024, HP revealed in a blog post that it would be introducing HP Print AI and AI-enhanced features like Perfect Output that will enhance the printing features of its machines. The cloud-based HP Scan AI Enhanced feature intended for commercial users also has "expanded availability," a new Build Workspace feature is aimed at design and construction professionals to make tasks like field reports and other collaborative work easier, if not automated.

The highlight of the announcement is definitely "Perfect Output." As HP says, more than half of print jobs come from web browsers, but these prints are often undesirable due to the inclusion of advertisements, oddly scaled images, or excessive white space. Perfect Output "bridges the gaps between what people see on the screen and what they intend to print," reformatting pages in real-time for each print job to focus on just the needed information.

The kinds of improvements one can expect from Perfect Output aren't just limited to trimming content from pages. You can also combine spreadsheets spread across multiple pages into a single, clean page and graphic.

When you can expect to start using these features, HP Print AI is already available as an exclusive beta of Perfect Output to "select print customers," the launch will continue throughout 2025. HP Build Workspace and HP Scan AI Enhanced are also available. Build Workspace has additional AI capabilities in beta in the US and Europe and is expected to roll out worldwide in Spring 2025. Meanwhile, HP Scan AI is only available in North America, "most of Europe and Latin America, and parts of Asia."

Overall, this does seem like a helpful way to leverage AI technology for printers. However, many features seem more about utilizing AI power in the cloud than AI power on-device. This makes sense, though, especially since we're talking about printers that don't have much processing power— unless we're headed to a future where even standard printers have CPUs and NPUs, which seems quite expensive and unlikely.

Christopher Harper
Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    Didn't HP sell off its printer business and now just rebadges someone else's?

    For me, remote working probably did the most to reduce my printer usage, on the job. On rare occasions, I do still print things at the office. At home, I have a monochrome Samsung laser printer I bought like a dozen years ago, but I barely use it once per year. Samsung no longer makes laser printers, either.

    I think it's kinda funny how Xerox saw the era of the "paperless office" coming like 45 or 50 years ago. That's why they setup Xerox PARC, which is where a lot of the innovations happened that Apple (and others) drew from.
    Reply
  • Neilbob
    Aaaauuuurgh! I can't stand this absurdity!

    Why are they so intent on obfuscating the process of PRINTING A DOCUMENT?! All this stuff used to be perfectly fine and achievable without the 'assistance' of 'AI' and other dong-fartery. Yes, I just made that up.

    I don't know if it's possible to frown so much your face turns inside-out, but if it is I very nearly managed it.
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    There's multiple reasons HP's printer sales are plummeting, and AI is not going to fix this. HP should take that AI money and invest it into making higher quality printers that don't demand ink subscriptions or appear to intentionally self-destruct after 2 years. HP can't control what's going on with remote work and the expansion of electronic signatures, but they can control their faltering product quality.
    Reply
  • newtechldtech
    bit_user said:
    Didn't HP sell off its printer business and now just rebadges someone else's?

    For me, remote working probably did the most to reduce my printer usage, on the job. On rare occasions, I do still print things at the office. At home, I have a monochrome Samsung laser printer I bought like a dozen years ago, but I barely use it once per year. Samsung no longer makes laser printers, either.

    I think it's kinda funny how Xerox saw the era of the "paperless office" coming like 45 or 50 years ago. That's why they setup Xerox PARC, which is where a lot of the innovations happened that Apple (and others) drew from.
    The funny thing is that the oldest tech dot matrix printers are still being used everywhere for hardcopy invoices and receipts ..
    Reply
  • husker
    Is this really going to run on one of the trained AI models? Or are they just going to use some formatting software that runs in the cloud somewhere, and then throwing the AI term out there as a marketing gimmick?
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    Neilbob said:
    Aaaauuuurgh! I can't stand this absurdity!

    Why are they so intent on obfuscating the process of PRINTING A DOCUMENT?! All this stuff used to be perfectly fine and achievable without the 'assistance' of 'AI' and other dong-fartery. Yes, I just made that up.

    I don't know if it's possible to frown so much your face turns inside-out, but if it is I very nearly managed it.
    Yes but how else are they going to sell their brand of snake oil if they do not brand it with AI enhancement.
    Reply
  • logainofhades
    HP shot themselves in the foot with the subscription junk.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    bigdragon said:
    There's multiple reasons HP's printer sales are plummeting, and AI is not going to fix this. HP should take that AI money and invest it into making higher quality printers that don't demand ink subscriptions or appear to intentionally self-destruct after 2 years. HP can't control what's going on with remote work and the expansion of electronic signatures, but they can control their faltering product quality.
    I've found this shift to be highly ironic as their products being reliable and relatively simple is what fueled their rise to the top in the first place. I doubt it'll be possible to turn back the clock period, but you're absolutely right if they focused on the engineering side they might be able to stabilize.
    Reply
  • Co BIY
    Neilbob said:
    Aaaauuuurgh! I can't stand this absurdity!

    Why are they so intent on obfuscating the process of PRINTING A DOCUMENT?! All this stuff used to be perfectly fine and achievable without the 'assistance' of 'AI' and other dong-fartery. Yes, I just made that up.

    I don't know if it's possible to frown so much your face turns inside-out, but if it is I very nearly managed it.

    HP will undoubtedly train their AI with the collected works of the world's low-rent used car salesmen, gilded-age robber barons, the worst stereotypes of middle-eastern traders (of all types), gormless eurocrats, transnational con-men, and a collection of the least popular Marvel and Bond villains.
    With the express goal of extracting the most lucre from the marks for the least amount of productive output.
    Reply
  • jackt
    goodbye privacy on printers too now...
    Reply