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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."
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.
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.
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.
Forests that can keep up with this printer - Priceless
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
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
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.
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.