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HP Invents A New Way To Print
Sushant Bhatia writes "Forbes is reporting that HP is introducing new technology in its inkjet printers that should help the company and consumers save time and money. If successful, the strategy may alter the economics of the printer market. The new inkjet platform, which will initially be geared toward the high end of the market, will incorporate the print head in the printer itself rather than in the ink cartridge. It means cheaper prints for consumers (about 24 cents per photo print) and faster output. HP says it has more than halved the time it takes to print a 4-inch-by-6-inch photo, to 14 seconds. The press release from HP has details on the new technology."
If not, this sounds like it could be a good business opportunity.
I had an Epson in 1998 that had that. The print heads clog up when the ink dries in them. Now you have to buy a new printer instead of new cartriges, awesome.
Exactly my opinion!!!
Epson has been doing this for like, 8 years or more!
How is this an 'invention'??? Did they buy Epson so they now have bragging rights?
No, it'll be worse. As well as the ink being the same price, your printer will now need to be replaced more regularly. HP win all round, consumer loses out on both counts.
I'm still a bit baffled why this is news though, Epson printers have had headless carts for ages...
"Hay guyz, check out this new car!" "Fuck cars, I ride my bike."
"Hay guyz, check out this new bike!" "Fuck bikes, I walk."
"Hay guyz, check out this new printer" "Fuck printers, I email people"
Shut up.
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This could make it easier to have alternative vendors for these new cartridges. Unless HP has some devious plan. I actually did read the FA and did not see reference to it...
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yes, they have offered remote printing to most locations for a few years now.
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I have a Canon BJC-600 that is over 11 years old, and has a seperate (replaceable) print head, and 4 individual ink cartridges.
ELEVEN years ago Canon made this printer, yet Epson and HP love to brag about innovations such as seperate cartridges, permanent print heads, and the like. Meanwhile most HP cartridges come with the print heads clogged for you already (save you the trouble of printing anything) and Epson does you the service of gouging you on the cost of "economical" individual cartridges.
Better still, the Canon has printed many thousands upon thousands of pages, the ink is cheap, refills are cheaper, and it still works fine...oh and its ELEVEN YEARS OLD. I wouldn't hold my breath for an HP to last eleven days.
Which is why the print head reads a chip in the ink cartrige and fails to print if it is not genuine HP ink.
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Not exactly.
If this tech is anywhere close to Epson and their built in Printheds, they will be making money on both.
Epson's built in Printheds was the stupidest idea I ever saw, at least consumer wise. Yes it would print well, but I hope you dont stop printing for more than a week or so, becuase once that printhead clogs it time to toss the printer away and buy another one.
The best design I've seen so far is the Canon designs. They Practicially encouraged refilling on those cartrages, they would last just about forever, and in case of the BC21, if the print head would go bad, you would just buy the full cartrage set with the printhead instead of just the ink wells, which were also refill friendly.
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Why would this make them cheaper than the competition? Canon and Epson already integrate the print head into the printer rather than the cartridge. Of course HP's argument was always that you got better and more reliable output by recieving a new printhead each time you reaplced the cartridge, not sure how they will deal with their own PR (similar to Intel and the Mhz myth).
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That's the way I try to do it, don't have a printer. But I don't use Kinko's. 2002 is the last time I went. I had my income tax in PDF format on a floppy disk. (Didn't want to pay the "efile" premium.) Kinko's asked $10 for them to do the work, or I could rent one of their computers at such a high rate I could easily spend more than $10 if it took too long to load the document and wait for the printing. Either way, there was an additional charge per page, something like $0.50. Was high compared to $0.10 per page on a plain old copier. Such high prices were making efiling competitive. I walked out. Decided to bend my employer's rule against printing personal stuff on company equipment.
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$.24 per copy??? Shoot, I can just put my photos on a CD-R after cleaning the pictures up and print them out at Walgreens for .19 a photo, and they look better! Have seen very few inkjets approach 'photo quality' output.
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I own an HP K60 and it has performed well, until recently when the printer started refusing to print, with the message "scanner failure". Why the failure of the scanner should render the entire printer useless is one obvious design flaw, but the worst part is after doing research, it became obvious the problem was dirt on a sensor deep in the printer. Someone had posted a solution to this problem on HP's support forum and they removed it. The process simply pointed out where to unscrew a few screws and blow out an area with compressed air, but apparently HP didn't want anyone knowing the solution to the problem was that simple. That sucks, and for that reason I'm not buying any more HPs, not to mention their software is lousy. I recently replaced the K60 with a Canon MP780 and have been very pleased. Plus it has a separate, replacable print head, so I'm not sure what the big deal of this article is in the first place.
The S400 ( http://www.yopi.de/Canon_S400_Tintenstrahldrucker_ A4_color ) to be exact, it separates the print head out as an ink catrage container. This has two advantages:
1. You can replace the print heads only when needed (eg, not with every catrige change)
2. You can change the print heads!
think about the new HP thing, a new printer every time you need to change the printer heads (changed my printers twice already, how much are new printers nowadays?)
Actually, I believe the reason for integrating disposable printheads with ink cartridges is largely driven by maintenance requirements and support costs. Inkjet print heads clog up and are somewhat finicky, especially over years of intermittent use. It's far easier to have users change the printhead when they change the ink cartridge.
I'm very aware that Epson has been using non-disposable printheads integrated into the printer. This is in part why Epsons are generally more favored by high-end users. However, letting your Epson sit for a couple months or more can easily make it unusable, and cleaning the nozzles with alcohol can ruin them. (A glycol solution is available that does a great job.)
I had an Epson CS880 that I modified with a homebrew CFS ink system to avoid paying for new ink carts, it worked great, but I had to clean it often especially if nothing was printed for several days. I had to soak the nozzles overnight once after not printing for a month. Eventually after another period of disuse I couldn't get the nozzles all working again and had to toss the whole printer.
I replaced it with an Epson SP-R300 and a new CFS system (not homebrew-this model has chipped carts) and now have my server sending a 6-color test page to it each night to prevent nozzle clogs. It's great printer, except for the whole cartridge-chipping thing. It makes using a CFS a lot more complicated, and cheats non-CFS users out of using all the ink in each cart.
As for using laserjets, you gotta be kidding? Show me a $100 laser printer that can print photo quality color at over 5000dpi. With my CFS-modded R300 (~$400US) I can print 4x6 photos for about 16 cents each.
And if you have never printed on anything better than a $2,400 HP color laserprinter, then you have no idea what you are talking about.
I work in digital color, and do regular production work on both wide-format inkjet as well as toner devices. Particularly the HP Laserjet 9500 (an $8000 device) who's output can easily compete against litho, much less the "worst inkets". It even beats HP's Indigo presses. Can it exceed the gamut of "archival" pigmented inks? No, but then not much can, besides hi-fi 6-color process litho. Can it do good excellent photography? Absolutely.
In fact, there are a number of toner devices that are quite excellent. Ever seen the output of the latest Canon CLC's? Ever seen a Xeikon? A Xerox Docucolor?
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