One of my enduring gags of the 1990s was that only techies could ever regard printers as “peripherals”. For lesser folks, the vital need to put ink on paper ensured that a better name for printing machines would be “centrals”.

Today, I’m not certain the gag is all that telling. In my home office, the struggle against incoming newspapers and general business post has led me to do without a printer for four years. In 2005 only the most recalcitrant client demands invoices that are printed; most reasonable souls merely want email attachments.

Yet the printer still has its corporate uses. What’s more, behind the humble machine stands some intricate engineering – and some equally intricate relationships.

These thoughts are inescapable as, led by an expatriate managing director, I walk around the 5,000-employee factory that Brother, based in Nagoya, Japan, operates in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in southern China. There most of the staff are women aged between 17 and 21, who hail from outlying provinces. They turn out 350,000 inkjet printers a month, mainly for export. A typical machine doesn’t just print, but scans and faxes too. It consists of 400 parts, sent in by no fewer than 200 suppliers.

To get each machine to work properly every time, parts at Shenzhen are inspected quite ruthlessly. Tiny and sometimes resembling pearls, they’re sorted by nimble hands and checked with sharp eyes and serious microscopes. Many are also washed free of dust ultrasonically, barcoded, and checked for performance under heat, humidity and repeated use.

There are booths for detecting excessive noise; and ink imported from Japan is subject to chemical analysis. Machines taped up in their boxes, ready for despatch, are ripped open to check that earlier inspections were accurate. When faulty parts are found they can be redesigned on-site. A whole R&D unit is devoted to just that.

Yes, R&D. Although the innovation done at Brother Shenzhen is relatively limited at present, it’s a sign of things to come. For all the cold war between Japan and China today, there’s no evidence of it on the factory floor. Instead, Brother teaches its Chinese staff not just Japanese, but engineering and chemistry too.

All this is more vital for UK corporate buyers of printers than they might think. New Operating and Financial Review rules became mandatory on 1 April. As a result, UK firms face pressure to make their arrangements with suppliers transparent and ecologically sustainable. Printers may stay cheap, but corporate buyers will have to know who is doing what to whom in their manufacture and assembly.

Printers, though absent from my home, are poised to become more ubiquitous, not less.

Working with Kyocera, Brother has demonstrated a colour inkjet device that turns out nearly three pages a second, at 600x600 dots per square inch, for an energy input of just three watts.

The Japanese firm has also begun to find applications for M-Print, a 100x100x17.5mm mobile printer that turns out A7 slips at 300dpi and boasts Bluetooth. Among early adopters of the 300-gram, matt black machine: field sales people working for SAP. Apparently, they still like to leave a hard-copy receipt with customers.

‹ www.brother-uk.com ‹ james@woudhuysen.com