Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
"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.
I believe its been tried before. Do a google search on "drum memory". Was slow, even for its day.
> 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.
Yeah, we should all stop thinking, because everyone else is already thinking.
The market for performance-at-all-costs drives was never large enough to sustain a lot of development, and the ability of RAID technology to obtain some of that performance at nearly none of the cost has pretty much exterminated any hope of radical increases in performance.
That said, however, it wouldn't surprise me if having multiple actuators might not increase the turbulence in the air inside the drive, making it harder to keep the heads flying at low heights. You might therefore wind up trading density for decreased average seek time, which would also cut into throughput (since fewer bits fly past the heads per second).
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.