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.
Spec Sheet from Brother: http://www.brother.com/brother_En/e-topics/inkjet/ inkjet.pdf
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.
Well, if it does, and printing at that speed, we might finally get some use out of the classic error message 'lp0 on fire'...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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
For sufficiently small values of "disaster."
disaster |di.zast.r| noun
1. a sudden event, such as an accident or a natural catastrophe, that causes great damage or loss of life.
2. Accidentally printing off a bunch of pages.
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.