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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."
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).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
$.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.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
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.