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World's Fastest Inkjet Printer?
An anonymous reader writes "Brother Industries has just demonstrated what they say is the world's fastest inkjet printer. The prototype uses a revolutionary new static head array to achieve amazing speeds of around 150 full colour pages per minute."
"World's Most Over-Used Headline Cliche"... ;)
libertarianswag.com
Wow, it must be fast.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Obviously not the world's fastest troll, are you? Second post? For shame, man!
Who'd win in a race between the inkjet and the hacker?
In terms of engineering this ain't nothing new. You can do multiplication in O(1) space and O(n^2) time or O(1) time and O(n^2) space [well it's actually O(lg N) time ... but who's counting].
It's a cool idea [can't RTFA cuz of slashdotting] since a lot of home users use inkjet.
Now all they have todo is make ink cartridges that hold more than 9mL of ink... 9mL does ~300 sheets, a 50mL would be more than enough for a home office then....
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Exactly how much heat would be produced by spitting out 150 pages per minute... Enough to set the whole thing on fire?
Does it have a Linux driver? Yeah, Canon, I'm looking at you.
...to prove how insanely great the print quality is on this thing, the author of said article provides a very lossy jpeg scan as evidence. Having said that, if they can get 600x600 at > 100 PPM, I'm all in.
-theGreater.Speeds like that can be disasterous during a printing accident. Recently in the office a young secretary accidentally printed out (on one of our 75 pages/min printers) numerous copies of a document around 400 pages in length. Thankfully it was just black-and-white text, rather than colorful images.
In any case, it took her a full two minute to realize her mistake, and another four or five minutes to figure out how to stop the print job. By that time she had printed off about 500 worthless pages.
When it comes to these machines, printing mistakes can be costly and difficult to deal with. It's unfortuante that many of these printers can hold 5000+ pages of paper. While convenient, it is just screaming for disaster!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
... cost more than the printer?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
Brother Industries today instigated the world's cheapest advertising campaign by announcing their unreleased product on Slashdot with help from a guy in the tech-support department. ;-)
How big would the paper resovior have to be to sustain printing for longer than three minutes?
Canon is well-known and well-respected in the Linux community for either directly providing Linux drivers, or at least providing the technical information necessary for others to write such drivers.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Cool. Color printers really do take to long. Still I wouldn't expect to be able to get one at Best Buy any time soon.
One good thing that may come out of it... Do you suppose it could possibly drive the outrageous price of ink refills on normal "slow" printers down somewhat ?
I'm thinking that if you need something that fast, you will use a different technology 'cause the cost of ink will slaughter you.
Now if somebody would come up with an inkjet printer that uses cartridges that cost around a buck a piece, then I'll be excited!
Like you're a speed demon....
☠
Spec Sheet from Brother: http://www.brother.com/brother_En/e-topics/inkjet/ inkjet.pdf
Now if the hard drive industry would just put some thought into non-moving heads...
I've thought for years that a series of heads side by side, with code and logic to read sequentially or simultaneously would drastically improve hard drive performance, while reducing hardware failures.
Almost every time I have a hard drive die it's because of failed heads. Since using UPS's I haven't had a single fried board.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
At long last, technology catches up with those really cool printers and fax machines in the movies! We'll be able to print suspect photos in less than a second! Yay!
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
The company I used to work for does high-speed printing. They developed their own inkjet array drum, looked like one of those radial aircraft piston engines. We're talking over 400 feet per minute, continuous...
Actually, many printers are known to run vxWorks. Some from Lexmark have been reported to run a stripped down version of NetBSD.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Now, are those 150 pages per minute actually legible, or are they just covered with random splotches of color?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Posted by Red in future tech | E-Mail This Entry
The Brother Industries high speed inkjet printer in prototype form. Codenamed Cobra, this little puppy can spit out any size of print output at around 170 pages per minute. OK, you want me to back up and repeat that? Any size of printed inkjet paper output at 170 pages every sixty seconds. Demonstrated for the first time ever last week at a Brother press seminar. How are they doing it? Well....
So apparently the secret lies in the use of new Piezo Inkjet Line Head technology, which prints at 600×600 dpi, but doesn't actually move at all. The ink is transferred at high speed as the paper passes underneath the static nozzles. (see below left - click on all images for full view)
In order to get the throughput, the printer contains a separate head for each colour, so that the paper receives all the ink in one high speed sweep. The passel of assembled journalists at the demonstration last week saw this beast churn out 150 A6 pages a minute without drawing breath, which was pretty darn impressive. (see below right for a scan of the actual printed output)
The company boffins at the demo told us that in order to achieve this speed for larger paper sizes, they just need to connect up more heads in a wider array. For instance, two heads joined together longways would give A4 printing. The concept of poster sized inkjet prints being produced at offset litho printing speeds is little short of miraculous. But just think of the ink costs...ouch!
Apparently this technology also features the lowest power requirements of any inkjet head on the market, and is smaller than equivalent spec products, which should eventually mean good things for home as well as industrial users. Eventually? Well, the technology was first announced at this year's Cebit exhibition in Germany, but this was the first ever live demonstration to the media, and the company is being very coy on any production dates. In fact it seems that the tech needs some co-operative funding (i.e. a production partner?) in order to progress further. And no word on potential retail pricing was given either.
So for now the printer is seeing action only at the World Fair in Aichi, Japan, printing out A6 sheets for tourist visitors to the Brother pavilion. Here's hoping we see more of this amazing technology sooner rather than later. In the meantime here's a PDF of the technology paper.
Specification Notes.
Head - 2656 nozzles per head, 600 dpi, 108 mm width (4.25 inches).
Print speed - 800 mm per second.
Energy saving - Deformable Piezo actuator provides 1/14 of the power requirement of conventional nozzles. For example, the A6 picture sample on the right requires only 3 watts of power, at 150 sheets per minute.
Size - Trapezoidal nozzle zone shape provides for dense arrangement of cavities. The result is a head which is 152 mm wide, 22 mm deep and 1 mm high. Heads can be arranged in longer arrays as needed.
Droplet size - Unspecified. 4 sizes available.
Reliability - 10 billion dots/nozzle or more (still testing).
The scanned picture which the article mentions was continuously printed at 150 pages per minute is here. As sample images go it does contain a lot of colour, I would've assumed a "150 pages per minute" claim would've been in non-Real World cases like printing 8 coloured pixels on a piece of A4.
This might make it finally worth my while to print out pdf documentation that accompanies software purchases. It has not been (I tell myself) cost, but the godawfull amount of time it would take to get a manual out as soon as I realize I'm in trouble and need that manual right away.
Just think of what would happen if the thing overheated. You'd have sheets of charcoal coming out of the printer faster than you can stuff them in the trash.
I quake at the possibilities for buffer overruns....
☠
They've just discovered the holy grail of inkjet industry revenue.
That's like 5 color cartridges per minute, at $32 a pop!
*sends a printjob*
....
:}
"Magenta is low??? I haven't even been printing for a minute!"
*replaces 15$ cartridge*
"CYAN!!!!??!!! Arrrghh"
*replaces another 15$ cartridge*
Seriously... they had better have some massive ink tanks to back up that speed of printing. Please let them be refillable from a pint jug also
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
Can't RTFA yet, but does this mean reloading the entire "array" is going to implode my wallet? I guess that depends if it's one giant cartridge or multiple cartridges huh?
TFA states that it prints 150 A6 pages per minutes. A6 pages are only 4.13in x 5.83in. Alot smaller than USA's standard 8 1/2in x 11in paper size.
I suppose it uses standard ink cartridges / print heads in a gatling style configuration. And since you'll be able to spew out ink at up to $85/minute, they're just going give these away. Especially to schools.
I pay $4 per cartridge, which doesn't seem too unreasonable to me.
My printer does photo quality.
The printer itself was $100
I do my part to keep ink prices down by researching before I buy.
Do you pay $20+ per inkjet cartridge?
Yeah, except that after 30 seconds you have to change the cartridge...
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
"So apparently the secret lies in the use of new Piezo Inkjet Line Head technology, which prints at 600×600 dpi, but doesn't actually move at all. The ink is transferred at high speed as the paper passes underneath the static nozzles. In order to get the throughput, the printer contains a separate head for each colour, so that the paper receives all the ink in one high speed sweep"
:-)
Sounds impressive, although I wonder how it copes with wet ink on the pages. If they really are coming through at 150ppm then I suspect that the problem of still wet ink from the newly printed pages might mark the pages that land on top of it.
Still a vast improvement on my 6ppm printer I have at the moment.
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
Most of us have probably run into the problem where you don't use the inkjet printer for a while, so the ink dries in the print nozzles.
Next to impossible to clean, and when possible, a serious pain in the ass. Not to mention you tend to waste a ton of ink.
Say the office closes for a week. Bam, now you have a very expensive paperweight. Unless of course, you can either clean, or replace the print heads.
How expensive do you think this will be?
No thanks, I think I will stick with a slower, but generally more durable, and better print quality color laser.
I just got a color laser printer for 350$ and I am not going back to inkjet. Ever.
This is totally insecure, but very convenient.
Helo??? Line printers have been around forever and are still in use at a lot of places, why did it take so long to figure this one out. Is there some missing technology that was the real key to making this happen for ink jets?
The only bad thing is the price. Dot matrix line printers are REALLY fast, but the are also REALLY expensive. Will it also be the case with this? Maybe that is the reason by this is only getting press now.
My problem with paper is that it is almost impossible to get rid of. The stuff just makes piles on my desk. It's horrible, so I only print out final drafts. (It drives my parents crazy, though. They grew up with paper and have trouble reading LaTeX source.)
☠
And the purpose of an inkjet printer that uses paper and ink this fast, when there are now color laser printers that produce better output at a lower cost per page, and likely cost less, is what? Who wants this except the over priced Ink sellers (Inkjet ink costs more than Dom Perignon or other expensive champaign, ounce for ounce)? And I have enough problems replacing clogged and spotty inkjet nozzels when I have a small number of nozzels (that therefor get enough use to usually keep them flowing, how hard is it going to be to maintain good quality output for a device with 2656 nozzels per color (that seems like low resolution for a full page head too).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Like $8 million?
So, at a zillion pages-per-minute, the ink cartriges should last, oh, 5 minutes or so?
...a Beowulf cluster of these printing!
Yes, speed is great, but I honestly don't find myself holding my breath for a printout from mapquest,etc.
How about:
1. A super-cheap to refill DIY printer. Sure, it goes against the whole business model of printers & ink. Then find some way to have it not dry out after periods of non-use.
2. A reasonably priced printer that prints on both sides of the paper.
3. Bullet-proof linux drivers. I gave up on CUPS + HP printer when it would print out 90% of the page, and then several pages of garbage, thus wasting paper.
4. an ez-un-jamming printer. When a paper doesn't go in 100% perfectly straight, hilarity ensues trying to pull the confetti out without damaging things.
Or maybe I should just save up some $$$ and go strictly laserjet instead of mooching from work.
the mirrordot of this is here.
So I can finnally print porn faster than I can slideshow it.
Sure it can print pages fast, but every few minutes you'd need to stop and change the cartridge! They always stick it to you with the damn ink cartridges!
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
"Revolutionary" ?
It uses the same method as LED displays have for years and it's revolutionary?
I can just see it now. People chanting in the streets. This technology is so great it'll overthrow the United Nations. Maybe it was this technology that resulted in the NON!(!!) vote in France!
Let's try and keep the fanatical hyperbole to a minimum, shall we?
So that means it can actually print 50 pages per minute? Printers can never even come close to their advertised speeds. If you're printing one character per page in draft mode, the sheet-feeder doesn't even seem fast enough to handle it.
Okay, 150ppm for A6. How wet are those pages? And A6 is a very small piece of paper (about 1/4 the surface area of 8.5x11). My guess is that if you wanted a somewhat dry, smear proof 8.5x11 piece of paper, the speed of that Brother printer would be at most 30-40ppm (which is still fast for ink!).
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
At those speeds, I shudder to think how fast you can burn through ink.
I suppose you can find the people/businesses with these printers by the 6 large water towers converted into ink tanks out back....
www.eFax.com are spammers
World's fastest inkjet printer?
Posted by Red in future tech | E-Mail This Entry
The Brother Industries high speed inkjet printer in prototype form. Codenamed Cobra, this little puppy can spit out any size of print output at around 170 pages per minute. OK, you want me to back up and repeat that? Any size of printed inkjet paper output at 170 pages every sixty seconds. Demonstrated for the first time ever last week at a Brother press seminar. How are they doing it? Well....
So apparently the secret lies in the use of new Piezo Inkjet Line Head technology, which prints at 600×600 dpi, but doesn't actually move at all. The ink is transferred at high speed as the paper passes underneath the static nozzles. (see below left - click on all images for full view)
In order to get the throughput, the printer contains a separate head for each colour, so that the paper receives all the ink in one high speed sweep. The passel of assembled journalists at the demonstration last week saw this beast churn out 150 A6 pages a minute without drawing breath, which was pretty darn impressive. (see below right for a scan of the actual printed output)
The company boffins at the demo told us that in order to achieve this speed for larger paper sizes, they just need to connect up more heads in a wider array. For instance, two heads joined together longways would give A4 printing. The concept of poster sized inkjet prints being produced at offset litho printing speeds is little short of miraculous. But just think of the ink costs...ouch!
Apparently this technology also features the lowest power requirements of any inkjet head on the market, and is smaller than equivalent spec products, which should eventually mean good things for home as well as industrial users. Eventually? Well, the technology was first announced at this year's Cebit exhibition in Germany, but this was the first ever live demonstration to the media, and the company is being very coy on any production dates. In fact it seems that the tech needs some co-operative funding (i.e. a production partner?) in order to progress further. And no word on potential retail pricing was given either.
So for now the printer is seeing action only at the World Fair in Aichi, Japan, printing out A6 sheets for tourist visitors to the Brother pavilion. Here's hoping we see more of this amazing technology sooner rather than later. In the meantime here's a PDF of the technology paper.
Specification Notes.
Head - 2656 nozzles per head, 600 dpi, 108 mm width (4.25 inches).
Print speed - 800 mm per second.
Energy saving - Deformable Piezo actuator provides 1/14 of the power requirement of conventional nozzles. For example, the A6 picture sample on the right requires only 3 watts of power, at 150 sheets per minute.
Size - Trapezoidal nozzle zone shape provides for dense arrangement of cavities. The result is a head which is 152 mm wide, 22 mm deep and 1 mm high. Heads can be arranged in longer arrays as needed.
Droplet size - Unspecified. 4 sizes available.
Reliability - 10 billion dots/nozzle or more (still testing).
The scanned picture which the article mentions was continuously printed at 150 pages per minute is here [redferret.net]. As sample images go it does contain a lot of colour, I would've assumed a "150 pages per minute" claim would've been in non-Real World cases like printing 8 coloured pixels on a piece of A4.
Stationary print heads... that seems so much like the old-as-balls HP line printers that we have here that I'm wondering if they're going to have it print on fanfold greenbar paper. Maybe they'll rediscover batch processing too.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I'm already able to zoom arbitrarily into QCIF sized webcam shots to enlarge the details. The advent of sound cards enabled cool chirping sound effects while stretching the zoom bounding box. But printing those images has always been a problem! Thank you Brother!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I wonder if the connection (I assume usb 2.0) can handle 150 full color photos in a minute. The article indicated that the demo printed 150 copies of the same photo. So, it only had to send one photo to the printer. I could see printing photo albums with this, but that is a lot of data to send to the printer.
A "sheet" in this case is an A6 sheet, which is 1/4 the area of a letter-sized piece of paper. It's roughly the size of a 4x6 photo: a little under 4.2" x 5.9" (105mm x 148mm).
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Slashdot: The Guinness Site of Records!
At that rate, anyone could open up a small printing-press, producing about 10,000 copies of a 150 page book in a week or so...
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/
So they reinvented the dot-matrix line printer.
Maybe it's new for ink jet, but it isn't new for printing. Line printers were pretty standard for high-speed but low-quality printing up until about 15 years ago; the economical laser printer killed them off.
The dot-matrix line printers would have a solid row of pins across the ribbon, and would form a complete row at a time. The fixed-font printers had a solid row of character hammers and a chain with the letter-forms on it. The chain was set up so that there would be more of the more frequently-used letters. The controller would then fire all the hammers it could when the right letters were in front of them, so very quickly it had formed the entire line also.
Oh, and "dot matrix" means "formed with a matrix of dots", so ink jet, laser, thermal, electrostatic, and pin-impact printers are all dot matrix. Daisy wheel, type ball, that funny thimble one, and the letter-chain line printer are all fixed-font... and we used to like them!
Modern low-end laser and LED printers really work the same way; a laser scan or LED bar exposes a row on a photostatic drum, which then picks up the toner and sticks it on the page. But you're still drawing a line of dots at a time, you just have to draw it on a transfer medium. (And with toner, you have to iron it out to make it stick--the so-called "fuser".)
Do they still have World Fairs? That's the biggest surprise to me.
01/20/09
I'm mentioning this in a post about fast printers because a year or two ago, he devised a program that sent tons and tons of empty pages to the printer at high speed, as quickly as possible, so that people won't know what's going on. As luck would have it, he owned a laser printer identical to the office printer. He disassembled his own printer and disconnected the power switch so it would be "always on", and he installed a battery in some empty space inside that would allow it to keep running for a minute or two if unplugged, he installed a hidden screw that held the paper tray inside so you couldn't pull it out to "save the paper" (it's stuck!), and somehow he had it so when you try to print a legitimate file, it would just start spitting out the "blank" pages, without printing anything on them. The day before, he collected tons of "scratch" paper that had all kinds of meaningless junk printed on it, and placed it inside the paper tray. He made "the switch", putting his own printer in place of the office one. In the morning, the secretary tried to print something, and from her perception, it appeared that all the data got screwed up on the way to the printer. Random ascii characters were spewing out at high speed. Little did she know it was pre-printed. She tried to pull out the paper tray and when she realized it was stuck, she clicked "cancel printing" and when that didn't work, she turned off the power switch to the printer, and when that didn't work, she turned off the whole UPS that the computer and printer were plugged in to, and when that didn't work (she thought the UPS battery was still powering it), she unplugged the printer from the UPS... She had messed up the whole desk in a matter of minutes, and the printer kept spewing things out! She truly freaked out! But the best part was when the nerd admitted it was a prank... She actually smacked him! It was funny.
Looks like HP is losing its reputation as the printer technology leader.
Don't worry! Just buy the ink...
;)
Sure, ink seems expensive now, but in 5 years time there will be a class action lawsuit and everyone that has been locked into buying overpriced ink will be entitled to a $3 rebate.
So it's not as bad as you make out!
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Fast and cheap inkjet printers. With extreamly overpriced ink. Fine the inkjet is faster now. But what it the cost per print? How does it compare with Laser or Solid Ink. Unfortunatly the reason why people spend the extra money on lasers and solid ink is because they print rather fast, so now people will see $100 Inkjet printers that print at the speed of a laser and jump right on them. And after every 3 minutes of printing you need a $30 cartridge of ink. Laser and Solid Ink offer far more pages per dolar in cost of suplies, vs. Inkjet. (still ink for Ground up plastic for laser, or the cost of a stick of wax (reson) for solid ink is also extramly high as well, but it is no where close the the markup of inkjet)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Encase the driver in 3 or 4 feet of concrete.
That'll work for most bullets.
I would say they'd also need a faster-drying ink, no? Or perhaps a heater on the output or something. I know whenever I print it takes a hell of a lot longer than half of a second for the ink to dry.
This was announced by Brother March 9th this year. Check out their documentation for this new technology. Interesting read, neverless !
...redferret.net. Buh bye.
In tech, and specifically PCs, large companies have driven research and progress. But it seems that there is always an OEM market that keeps prices reasonable, or finds ways to create the same product but cheaper.
Why isn't that happening with printers? Why isn't some off-market company coming up with printers that never need ink refills?
Finally, a quick, easy way for me to print out flipbook animations of all my porn vids!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
In my days of flogging epson kit, the technological advantage we used to stress to the customer was that Epson printers used their own patented technology (piezo electric), whilst all the rest used HP's/Canon's "bubblejet" technology. This was an advantage as anyone who'se seen Epson colour printouts will tell you, but I am wondering if anyone knows whether Brother have licenced this or have they developed something else which doesn't infringe on Epson patents...
It was only slow because they didn't know what we do now about how to fabricate electronics. They were using clunky wound-core magnetic pickups, which suffer from impedance problems: you can only make a magnetic field of a given size and strength expand and collapse so fast.
With modern fabrication and magneto-resistive heads, it should be possible to make head arrays of (say) 32 tracks, which read 32 bits at a time. Whatever is needed to adapt to the geometry of the disk. Or you could just use one big array, but that might result in board layout problems. Some bright engineer can figure that one out.
With enough head arrays, you could cover the entire disk. That would eliminate seek time, get rid of the head actuator motor, and drive up reliability while driving down cost. Drives could be smaller and use less power, or other things being equal could spin faster.
Given a fixed-head drive with one head per track (and probably you'd use several heads per track on the outer tracks), the time to read a particular sector would be about 1/2 the rotation of the disk, or 1/20000th of a minute for a 10K drive. That's 3ms.
However, since the head is fixed, you could get a call to read a certain sector and immediately begin reading the track it's on into cache. So for files larger than half a track, after the first half track the data comes from cache and you can go on to the next read. With even a naive read-ahead cache algorithm, most of your reads would come from cache.
Whatever other objections someone might have to this I have a trump card: for some applications, having a fixed head array makes sense. Once the technology is in use, eventually I think every hard disk would be made that way.
sigs, as if you care.
http://redferret.net.nyud.net:8090/?p=5291
.nyud.net:8090 after the domain name. Is that too hard?
I wonder why the story links don't use it BY DEFAULT? Just add
Brother's press press release shows what they're doing. The slow version still has a moving print head, but they hope to reach the point where there's one big print head covering the entire width of the paper. That eliminates the scanning mechanism and makes large ink tanks possible, since the ink tanks don't have to move.
Nothing yet from Brother on how much the print head will cost.
You FAIL IT on HISTORIC 666th post
More LIBATIONS to THE GODS!
TFA says it consumed only 3 watts.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
It was on "Tomorrow's World" which tells our British listeners how long ago I'm talking. The demonstration was of *huge* print jobs though, A2, A1 and A0 sort of size.
Deleted
Current heads are bigger because they have to move around. The actual functional part of the head is by definition exactly the width of one track. And width along the disk radius is the only dimension that really matters. Height along the spindle axis and length along the track arc are bounded, but of less concern.
Ah, I see your trouble. There is no arm. The head is fixed. Calibration is done one time. The only movement between platter and track is due to vibration and heat expansion, which are problems on different level: that's about track size and fly height, not feasibility. Once it's working, then you can worry about making it work better.
A serious problem with current drives is the reliance on the Bernoulli effect and fly height. With fixed heads, you could (mostly) evacuate the chamber, leaving just enough air (or some gas of your choosing) to allow filtration of microscopic debris.
Another neat thing that fixing the heads allows is better shock resistance.
A lot of the time innovation comes from people on the fringe of an industry with a fresh perspective.
sigs, as if you care.
While this particular printer only prints 150 A6 pages, it is clearly written in the article:
The company boffins at the demo told us that in order to achieve this speed for larger paper sizes, they just need to connect up more heads in a wider array. For instance, two heads joined together longways would give A4 printing
My new laser printer has a prominent red "Cancel" button on the top, which cancels the job...
Another good feature would be if printer drivers had a "cost per page" config parameter, so when people asked to print something it would bring up a dialog saying "Printing this 400 page document on the printer EPSON Color Stylus will cost $1200, are you sure?"
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
mod parent up
Because ink does actually stick on paper and magicly disappear from the ink cartridge. If we were to see a printer that would never need an ink refill it would have to use something else than ink.
Error: No error occurred
I think for most of us, it's more important for the manufacturors to come up with an ink formula that doesn't dry out and clugging the print head than any minute per page speed improvement. Print head clugging is probably (in my own experience) the single most frustrating problem with inkjet. Of course, this might cut into manufacturors' profit derived from ink cartridges...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You whippersnappers today.
When I was young, we didn' triapse, we crawled. And we liked it just fine.
...Penis. You have a really tiny one, right?
A6 is 1/4 the size of A4, which is 8.26" x 11.66".
Assuming a 1/8" left and right margin, that's about 75 ppm for 8.5"x11".
In a few years if and when this gets cheap, it will become the standard way of doing things, until of course something better comes along.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
... it doesn't look like much more than ~100 dpi on that scan...
Can it take slashdoting?
Not, the article is Slashdotted, but even the ARTICLE SUMMARY specifically says, "Brother Industries". Not Canon. Can you read?
Since we're talking inkjet, I want to know what the cost per page is for that mother. It might be more efficient than burning a stack of $20 bills.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
it takes 5 ink cartrages at $35 each to print those 150 pages
Your right its nothing new, well completely new.
Deformable Piezo actuator, I read that as probably a piezo-electric crystal that physicaly pushes the ink through the nozzle, which will probably mean that it's not a sensative to the ink as a thermal-inkjet would be.
It will probably allow for pigmented inks with higher opacity more like air-brush paint, transperant inks like a dye, glossy inks, or even conductive inks for us mere-mortals types.
Other than that it's just an update of the good-ol' line-printers of the 60's.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Yes, spend $150 and buy yourself a laser printer.
Or $500 if you want color.
And don't buy an HP, their drivers are awful.
I just got a Konica Minolta 2430DL. Plugged it in and it worked with Linux, no problems. The only thing it lacks is duplex printing.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Ground-Breaking New? No.
But, imagine this thing in a production environment.
It kills high-end inkjets in speed and I'm guessing there isn't any new head-technology besides getting so many to work together so well.
The bottleneck is in RIPing the image and the usual getting the job set-up effort.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
http://novajet1000i.encad.com/?s=1332&c=opp04
Many of them have extra tanks. The encad linked above has 8 500mL tanks, each tank runs $40 - $120 (yup! $0.08 per mL!). The actual printheads are replacable and look very similar to the old classic HP inkjet cartidge filled with foam and a hose on the top where the refill nib is.
The cool thing about these systems are that you can keep an extra tank to automatically switch to when one is dry, or you can switch easily between different inks for different purposes -outdoor/ uv resistant inks, archival, etc.
Firefox &
It wouldn't work. At the small scales used in modern hard drives, you can't park a head over a track and do I/O. It's more like one of those old arcade racing games, where the road swerves from side to side as you travel forward down the race track. The drive electronics have to continuously adjust the head position to keep it flying down the center of the track. Optical drives are even worse, they have to move the head assembly up-and-down and side-to-side to keep the laser focused on the track.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Absolutely no support for Linux. Not for the scanner, or the printeer. I havan't tried to access the memory cards. It's annoying. What's even more annoying is that they already have a CUPS driver for MacOS, so Linux support for at least the printer would be trivial.
Until the issue is resolved, I won't suggest brother devices to any of my friends or clients, because if they want to flip to Linux, they won't have any support.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Wow, that's pretty fast. Don't let Kinko's find out or they'll charge you $2 a sheet for color copies.
I'd really like to see an actual printout before I pass judgment, but my suspicions are pretty high that the quality isn't all that good. I've seen "fast" printers before, and the images are usually less than stellar. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong on this one.
Health Insurance Quotes
That's what it looks like to me.
The giant Cube can't be far way!
All your printers are belong to us!
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Sweet !! The printer only costs $125 The cartridge is $49,000...
Because ink is a physical item that is consumed in the process of printing? How do you propose marks be made on the paper?
But if someone is working on it, I'd prefer this technology first be directed at my wallet.
So, this printer can burn through about $100 in ink per minute? Great idea, if you're a printer company. Until the cost of inkjet ink drops by two orders of magnitude (to about 1 cent per full color page), this won't be a consumer product. The only reason consumers are buying inkjets now is because they can't do math, and don't realize how much it's costing them per page.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
How big does the battery have to be to run a *laser printer* for even a couple of minutes? Hmmm...
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
"Jane! Stop this crazy thing!"
the rainforest is shrinking even faster than it did yesterday.
Make an array of these heads and we'll be set. Then make an array of those arrays of heads and we'll be sitting pretty. Inkjets Christ!
I had an epson C84 printer... brand new... when the came-with-the-printer inks ran out, I bought some 3rd party ones... Two problems... the ink smelled -- like rotten eggs. You could smell it if a printed page was on the desk, and you were standing two feet away.
Aaah... I see the problem. Instead of the 'black' or 'cyan/yellow/magenta' cartridges, you bought the 'cat's piss' odour-ink cartridge.
This unique innovation allows you to print messages that your feline friends can understand using their own mode of communication (i.e. smell).
Of course, Fluffy doesn't have to know how to use a computer in order to reply. Just leave a sheet of paper out, and she'll give you a reply in no time!
We recommend you do this outdoors.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Now this is fast.
what they say is the world's fastest inkjet printer.
Ha! I say.
Kodak Versamark VX5000/VX5000e printing systems are designed to handle very heavy-duty production. These systems have print speeds of 150 Metres per minute, yielding more than 2,000 pages per minute, producing 100% variable data in black, spot colour or CMYK process colour, depending on the configuration.
Now thats fast.
Wow, it only took 20 years.
Now the question is, how do you do "Microweaving," or otherwise compensate for clogs and slight nozzle variations with this? Back when Constellation 3D existed, they were going to use microactuators to read their FMD 'Clearcards' -- and IBM does something similar with their nanoscale punchcard storage tech -- how long will it take Brother to figure out that they can jostle the fixed head slightly and add 'noise' to make up for the expected streaking? (Or, pray, is this actually part of the mechanism already, so users won't have to accept the tradeoff?)
Well for Black and white printers, 1,000 page per minute printers have been around for years.d =158&_dad=portal30&_schema=PORTAL30&_type=site&_fs iteid=34&_fid=60569&_fnavbarid=3080&_fnavbarsiteid =34&_fedit=0&_fmode=2&_fdisplaymode=1&_fcalledfrom =1&_fdisplayurl=
http://www.kodakversamark.com/servlet/page?_pagei
That printer prints on 17.92" wide roll paper at 500 feet a minute, so two 8.5 x 11 sheets side by side with trim at almost 4 times the speed. Granted the printer mentioned in the story is color, but the kodak does spot color (black plus one highlight color)
what ever happened to no news is good news?
Yeah and when this thing has a paper jam, it implodes upon itself. :P
that's also about 0.1 ink cartridges per minute. at least it's not an hp.
Well, you probably have not heard ofd =158&_dad=portal30&_schema=PORTAL30&_type=site&_fs iteid=34&_fid=60569&_fnavbarid=3080&_fnavbarsiteid =34&_fedit=0&_fmode=2&_fdisplaymode=1&_fcalledfrom =1&_fdisplayurl=.
Kodak Versamark yet. Have a look at http://www.kodakversamark.com/servlet/page?_pagei
(Although i don't think, it fits into your office...)
Regards,
blip
thanks for the laugh.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
A6 is about as big as your hand...double the length to get the A4 length means ~75 pages per minute - nothing to write home about. We have new full colour inkjets here that print thousands of feet per minute - then again their about 12 metres long, so not really for your SOHO market.
It's not the depth of the water thats the problem. It's the current that kills you.
This is a very good reason to implement a print quota system on your color printers. Make sure they support Linux or you'll end up paying for some proprietary Linux drivers on a per user basis at around $30 per user.
Before I came on board as Network Administrator, a Cannon Ink Jet 9100 was purchased - and alas, they can only print color to the old HP Deskjet 6xx & 8xx printers.
The fastest inkjet printer is launching an ink balloon out of a cannon. However, the resolution will be very poor. It is one of those Quantum Laws of Printing: the faster you print the worse the resolution and the balloon gun is simply an extreme example of this principle (so I explained to the judge in vain)....
Table-ized A.I.
No, I haven't RTFA, but a few things to take into account before wetting yourselves over this - sheet size (apparently A6 - which is postcard sized), what's the drying time on the inks, and how many prints can you do before changing the cartridges, is that engine repeat speed or first page out (the enigine may be that fast, but how fast is the interpreter?), is that speed sustainable or burst speed only?
Given production colour lasers can't do that speed yet, I'm skeptical as to the practical realities of such a device.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Okay, 600 DPI on an 8.5" wide paper at 800mm/second. That's 8.5*800/25.4=267in^2/sec. 267*600*600 = 96.12*10^6 dots/sec. If each dot is 3 bits (one for each of 3 colors), that's 288.36Mbps.
This is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Most print jobs don't print every dot and the driver could compress the stream, but the point is that this thing would require some serious bandwidth.