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

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!

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.