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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."
Does it have a Linux driver? Yeah, Canon, I'm looking at you.
...to prove how insanely great the print quality is on this thing, the author of said article provides a very lossy jpeg scan as evidence. Having said that, if they can get 600x600 at > 100 PPM, I'm all in.
-theGreater.Now if the hard drive industry would just put some thought into non-moving heads...
I've thought for years that a series of heads side by side, with code and logic to read sequentially or simultaneously would drastically improve hard drive performance, while reducing hardware failures.
Almost every time I have a hard drive die it's because of failed heads. Since using UPS's I haven't had a single fried board.
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The company I used to work for does high-speed printing. They developed their own inkjet array drum, looked like one of those radial aircraft piston engines. We're talking over 400 feet per minute, continuous...
And the purpose of an inkjet printer that uses paper and ink this fast, when there are now color laser printers that produce better output at a lower cost per page, and likely cost less, is what? Who wants this except the over priced Ink sellers (Inkjet ink costs more than Dom Perignon or other expensive champaign, ounce for ounce)? And I have enough problems replacing clogged and spotty inkjet nozzels when I have a small number of nozzels (that therefor get enough use to usually keep them flowing, how hard is it going to be to maintain good quality output for a device with 2656 nozzels per color (that seems like low resolution for a full page head too).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Yes, speed is great, but I honestly don't find myself holding my breath for a printout from mapquest,etc.
How about:
1. A super-cheap to refill DIY printer. Sure, it goes against the whole business model of printers & ink. Then find some way to have it not dry out after periods of non-use.
2. A reasonably priced printer that prints on both sides of the paper.
3. Bullet-proof linux drivers. I gave up on CUPS + HP printer when it would print out 90% of the page, and then several pages of garbage, thus wasting paper.
4. an ez-un-jamming printer. When a paper doesn't go in 100% perfectly straight, hilarity ensues trying to pull the confetti out without damaging things.
Or maybe I should just save up some $$$ and go strictly laserjet instead of mooching from work.
Okay, 150ppm for A6. How wet are those pages? And A6 is a very small piece of paper (about 1/4 the surface area of 8.5x11). My guess is that if you wanted a somewhat dry, smear proof 8.5x11 piece of paper, the speed of that Brother printer would be at most 30-40ppm (which is still fast for ink!).
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
At those speeds, I shudder to think how fast you can burn through ink.
I suppose you can find the people/businesses with these printers by the 6 large water towers converted into ink tanks out back....
www.eFax.com are spammers
It may be possible to set up a continuous ink system . I know, for example, that inksupply.com offers continuous flow ink systems that use some tube connections to feed the cartridge directly from bottles of ink. (but they currently only support Epson)
I wonder if the connection (I assume usb 2.0) can handle 150 full color photos in a minute. The article indicated that the demo printed 150 copies of the same photo. So, it only had to send one photo to the printer. I could see printing photo albums with this, but that is a lot of data to send to the printer.
It was only slow because they didn't know what we do now about how to fabricate electronics. They were using clunky wound-core magnetic pickups, which suffer from impedance problems: you can only make a magnetic field of a given size and strength expand and collapse so fast.
With modern fabrication and magneto-resistive heads, it should be possible to make head arrays of (say) 32 tracks, which read 32 bits at a time. Whatever is needed to adapt to the geometry of the disk. Or you could just use one big array, but that might result in board layout problems. Some bright engineer can figure that one out.
With enough head arrays, you could cover the entire disk. That would eliminate seek time, get rid of the head actuator motor, and drive up reliability while driving down cost. Drives could be smaller and use less power, or other things being equal could spin faster.
Given a fixed-head drive with one head per track (and probably you'd use several heads per track on the outer tracks), the time to read a particular sector would be about 1/2 the rotation of the disk, or 1/20000th of a minute for a 10K drive. That's 3ms.
However, since the head is fixed, you could get a call to read a certain sector and immediately begin reading the track it's on into cache. So for files larger than half a track, after the first half track the data comes from cache and you can go on to the next read. With even a naive read-ahead cache algorithm, most of your reads would come from cache.
Whatever other objections someone might have to this I have a trump card: for some applications, having a fixed head array makes sense. Once the technology is in use, eventually I think every hard disk would be made that way.
sigs, as if you care.
Funny? More like Insightful.