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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."
I wondered that too. The printer itself is standard size. But it probably sits on top of a tower of expansion drawers.
VOTE!
Spec Sheet from Brother: http://www.brother.com/brother_En/e-topics/inkjet/ inkjet.pdf
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.
You mean like this?
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.
Sorry, but i call bullshit.
Do you know just how many tracks a disk has? Hint: its many many thousand. You cant put so many heads over the disc because the head is orders of magnitudes wider than the track. Plus if you were only doing sparse head placement (like 100 heads evenly spaced), you could not keep them calibrated, plus even IF you could, seek times would get MUCH worse because of resonanz modes of the arm complex, increased inertia, ect.
Add to this the problems of sticktion, disturbance of the bernoulli effect because of the high head density, ect,ect, and the idea becomes braindead.
(there were dual head hds years ago, but calibration was a bitch).
You know, the harddisc industry (in fact any industry with x000 employees ) HAS people that are WAY smarter than you. So whenever you encouter something that doesnt make sense to you, maybe YOU are wrong.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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".)
That's because it was used in place of RAM (before RAM existed), not as a longer-term storage area.
For those of you just juicing for a pic, you can see it at Engadget
D
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 &