Misleading HP marketing

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Not one but two friends brought to my attention the apparently innovative new product by HP touted as a 3D scanner and printer HP TopShot LaserJet Pro M275.

I was surprised by the marketing information and curious to see what this device was capable of. If you've followed my blog, you've read about my late interest on 3D scanning and printing, so a 3D scanner that was being made by the biggest printer maker seemed like a big deal and maybe the signal of new devices to come.

However, after cutting through the marketing campaign, I was able to read some of the details of what the device can really do. That was the disappointing end of the history: what HP Topshot technology is about is not 3D scanning but to take pictures of objects.

Do I really need to say that of course the objects you can take pictures from can be 3D objects? Are not all the objects we use 3D? Ok, maybe you can claim that paper pages are not 3D (we can argue on the scale of it). But to me, HP marketing guys are stepping the line, as the two friends that came to me with this apparent great news are technical-knowledgeable people that just trusted the wording of the ads.

You can judge by yourself from this sentence on HP website mentioned above: "Scan images of 3D objects and post directly to the Web". But what it really means is: our Topshot scanner can take a picture of your objects besides of your flat documents. And we do that with several light sources so you get fewer shadows than if you take a picture with your phone.


But I can see that neither is recent news nor that I am alone in tagging this as misleading ...

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