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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?
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".)
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.
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