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."

Comments

Re:I beat 150 color pages in one minute once

[AyeRoxor!]

Obviously not the world's fastest troll, are you? Second post? For shame, man!

As seen on TV

[GeekDork]

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!

It can be ev worse in a horrible printing accident

[slimey_limey]

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....

Re:Very bad in a printing accident.

[brokencomputer]

Yeah. I heard that cars which go more than 5 mph may be bad when people accidently crash into each other. I think all cars with a max speed of more than 5 mph should be taken off the road since people have accidents.

-----
WrongPlanet.net

Re:So?

[LegendOfLink]

LOL! Yes, it would seem that today there is a "running theme", Slashdot style.

For those of you who still don't get it:

World's Biggest Hacker Held

followed immediately by...

World's Fastest Inkjet Printer?

Oh my god.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

They've just discovered the holy grail of inkjet industry revenue.

That's like 5 color cartridges per minute, at $32 a pop!

more ink, more $

[scpotter]

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.

Re:In case of Slashdotting..

[dfn5]

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).

Forests that can keep up with this printer - Priceless

Re:Drivers

[meringuoid]

Does it have a Linux driver?

Well, if it does, and printing at that speed, we might finally get some use out of the classic error message 'lp0 on fire'...

Static heads? How quaint

[red_dragon]

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.

Re:Very bad in a printing accident.

[Paradise Pete]

While convenient, it is just screaming for disaster!

For sufficiently small values of "disaster."

disaster |di.zast.r| noun
1. a sudden event, such as an accident or a natural catastrophe, that causes great damage or loss of life.
2. Accidentally printing off a bunch of pages.

Printer pranks with fast printers.

[rice_burners_suck]

Printers like this are just asking for company pranksters to screw around! In our company, there is this "resident nerd" (I'm the resident "geek"--I suppose there is a difference) who does all kinds of computer pranks. Most are a lot of the usual ones, like taking a screenshot of Windows saying you performed an illegal operation, and then setting that as the wallpaper... But a few were truly original and imaginative. Once, right around the time Windows 95 was coming out and most people still used DOS, he coded up a fake DOS command line interpreter. It looked like the usual DOS screen, black, with a "C:\>"... Any command you typed would return a "Bad command or file name." You type DIR and it says "Bad command or file name." It was in the autoexec file, so if you rebooted, that didn't help. Those kinds of pranks, simple but effective.

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.

Re:Printer pranks with fast printers.

[snookums]

Best admin prank I ever saw was someone who put this in the crontab of a test server which was sitting in the middle of the office:

3 20 * * * eject
19 20 * * * eject -t

Freaked the hell out of people working late ;-)

Re:Very bad in a printing accident.

[alexhs]

That sorts of accidents are happening because someone disabled Clippy, else something like what follows would have happened :

It seems you are trying to print. Are you sure ?
It seems you want to print a document lenghtier than 10 pages. Are you sure ?
It seems you want to print more that five copies of it. Are you sure ?
I'm going to print 4000 pages now. Is that OK ?
Aren't you just keeping to click on the 'Yes' button ?

Re:Why I hate paper

[thpdg]

Yeah, be careful how much of that stuff you use. What, you think it grows on trees?