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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."
Obviously not the world's fastest troll, are you? Second post? For shame, man!
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.
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.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.
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
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.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
At long last, technology catches up with those really cool printers and fax machines in the movies! We'll be able to print suspect photos in less than a second! Yay!
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
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...
Just think of what would happen if the thing overheated. You'd have sheets of charcoal coming out of the printer faster than you can stuff them in the trash.
I quake at the possibilities for buffer overruns....
☠
LOL! Yes, it would seem that today there is a "running theme", Slashdot style.
For those of you who still don't get it:
World's Biggest Hacker Held
followed immediately by...
World's Fastest Inkjet Printer?
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
They've just discovered the holy grail of inkjet industry revenue.
That's like 5 color cartridges per minute, at $32 a pop!
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.
I suppose it uses standard ink cartridges / print heads in a gatling style configuration. And since you'll be able to spew out ink at up to $85/minute, they're just going give these away. Especially to schools.
"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.
Forests that can keep up with this printer - Priceless
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
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
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.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
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.
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".)
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.
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.
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.
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 &
Yeah, be careful how much of that stuff you use. What, you think it grows on trees?
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."