Slashdot Mirror
New IBM Ultra Fast Printer
avxo writes "CNN/Money is reporting on a new IBM printer, that can print Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in less than a minute, by delegating pagination to a separate unit." Fully loaded it runs a million bucks. Plus the 330 pages it can print in a single minute is probably triple the pages I printed so far in 2005. I'm probably not the target audience *grin*
But can YOU change ink that fast?
Where are the photos of this beast. I dont want to go looking through the ibm site and almost every tech I know likes to see new toys.
can print Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in less than a minute........Plus the 330 pages it can print in a single minute is probably triple the pages I printed so far in 2005.
War and Peace was only 330 pages?
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Erm... what? Did I read as long as an SUV and half as wide? How large are 'normal' corporate printers?
Weren't we all promised that at the dawn of computing?
is finding enough people to read stuff at that rate. That's why it'd better be reliable - I can't imagine anyone bothering to check all the output for printing failures before sending it out to customers.
So much for paperless office.
And great news for rainforests, too.
PC Load Letter, WTF Is that?
except for now... 100x faster!
From TFA:
Cooper said IBM sees growth opportunities in large-capacity printing as marketers increasingly use direct mail to target customers. "Mail remains a very good way to market your business," he said, because consumers are overwhelmed by unsolicited e-mails, or spam, and don't like getting called by telemarketers.
Tis a shame that IBM is going to be marketing this printer for evil. I get enough junk mail, and the forests of our planet dont need anothe reason to be cut down.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
So much for the "paperless office" of the future. Maybe we should declare trees to be endangered species. ;)
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Wow - Don't accidently sit on that baby at the christmas party!
This is IBM's foray into the market that is dominated by the Xerox Docutech's. The Printing industry is moving toward Print on Demand. The concept is instead of a run of ten thousand books, it will print a single book as opposed to setting up a traditional printing press with minimum run lengths.
Stay tuned for new sig...
No, it'll just cost you $83333333.33 per month.
Reminds me of the laser we had on our system years ago. It would print as fast as the operator could feed it boxes of paper.
Impressive device.. huge.. loud...tempermental..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
in pain/fear.
War and Peace is 365 chapters and 1500 pages long.
On this 330 p/m printer will take about 5 minutes to print.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, but does it run Linux??????
as well as a picture on IBM's site.
v wwebpublished/4100home_ww
:-P
http://www.printers.ibm.com/internet/wwsites.nsf/
Of course you have to call for pricing
I work on a Xerox 6135. It makes 135 impressions per minute. Also, it can bind them into a book or take 11x17 sheet and fold it in half and staple it into a booklet. So speed really isn't the best thing. yeah you can print 330 ppm but then you have to hand do everything else.
wouldn't it be more cost-effective to use a bank of 10 33ppm printers?
You get your output just as fast, initial cost is lower, maintenance cost is likely to be lower, and if you get a failure on one unit, you're only down 10% of your printing capacity, instead of 100% of your printing capacity.
I see a great market for those who like to download books from usenet and print them out.
Printers these fast are often quite dangerous. A mistake can often be very costly and disruptive.
For instance, we had a new coder working on one of our projects. We had an array of fast laserjet printers, but even then they were nowhere near this fast. In any case, our new coder somehow managed to dump our entire codebase out to the printers. So out go 15 million lines of COBOL and C to our array of printers.
The coder doesn't realize what is happening at first. We estimated that about 200000 sheets of paper were printed before he got a call from the printing room asking him if there was a problem. After realizing that there was, and being unable to cancel the print job, he was at a loss. They couldn't just pull the plug on the printer array, as it'd take a day just to get the system back online. Eventually somebody was able to stop it, but it wasn't until after nearly 600000 sheets of paper had been wasted.
Indeed, printers these fast can be extremely useful, but when massive amounts of data are accidentally printed on them, the paper (and thus financial) losses can be extreme.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Some naval geeks realized you could get it to play tunes by adjusting what it print to hit various notes and slewing various amounts of paper for tempo. Intelligence people tend to be musically inclined and these geeks were no exception. Lord knows how many hours they invested in tuning their instrument but word came down that an admiral was going to tour the computer room. When he walked in, they started up their synth and the printer started belting out Anchors Away. The admiral was suitably impressed. My brother-in-law was relieved the admiral didn't inspect the back of the printer where the output stack was because the paper didn't fold properly and as a result, paper was strewn all over.
I remember in the early 90's Virginia Tech used to have some sort of IBM printer (pre lexmark) that could print staggering amounts paper. I remember them talking about skids of paper/min or hour. it looked more like a newspaper press with a big ole stream of paper and a bunch of scary knives at the end to do the paginagation. I remember the damn thing ate paper so fast that it had its own loading dock where the skids of paper were pushed off the back of the truck waiting to be consumed by the beast.
How many nanoLibrariesOfCongress is War and Peace? And since when is "three times the number of pages CmdrTaco printed so far in 2005" a valid Slashunit?
330 pages a minute. Thats 5.5 pages a second. Which is about the same as the frame rate I get on Doom 3 on an iMac G5 on high quality. Still I didn't buy my mac for games... at least thats what I keep telling myself.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I also would like to say "so much for the paperless office"
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
This CNN article also says that the new IBM printer will lighten your wallet by $1 million dollars, although you can buy a "cheap starter" model for $500,000.
_ jets_pretty_big_how_big_is_yours.html) that says the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are buying a Boeing 767 jet for their personal transportation. Perhaps they can install this printer on board to print their own Google Library books.
There is a report at Silicon Beat (http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2005/09/09/my
Sun and Fun
At work, we run Xerox Docutech's and Canon IR110 (a really fast 110ppm b&w machine) as well as Oce's large format 9800's (36" wide by any length up to 650').
The large format machines use hefty rolls and trim to length during printing. Sounds like this new technology is part large format, whereby it doesn't use pre-cut paper. I would imaging a lot of the speed increase comes because you have a continuous roll -- the space between the paper pages can be significant during the course of an entire run.
Speaking to printing on demand, I believe the industry is moving in that direction. We have seen incredible gains in our print facility on our new Xerox IGEN digital offset, which can print 100ppm in full color. This is perfect for those who want offset quality, but don't want the hassle of going through the setup process, and running thousand or even millions of peices.
And, even on our 110, I can print an entire large technical manual in under 5-10 minutes any way (and I assume the cost is significantly less to get a couple of those, than perhaps this new printer), but still for a single machine it is an incredible speed.
If you're tired, sleep! Wenn Sie muede sind, schlafen!
...print a Linux manual?
Being funny is my sig nature.
"Print at up to 330 linear feet (100.6 m) per minute (1,440 2-up duplex letter impressions or 1,354 2-up A4 duplex impressions)"
So doesn't that work out at 2,880 pages per minute?
How many library of congresses can this print in a minute?
Called the Termite 2000, it can conveniently be backed-up against any nearby forest...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
With the help of computer technology we can now produce more paper documents faster! Talk of prophecies missing the mark. :-)
If you look at the IBM website it claims 330 linear feet per minute, not 330 ppm. If a page is 11" long than that would be about 360 pages per minute.
Yep, implementing new procedures to prevent similar situations was also part of the cost of this accident. Besides the wasted time, paper and toner.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
(Ok, so I'm being a smart ass, but seriously, how would you combine the output from 10 printers efficiently?)
This is also interesting to me because it's not uncommon for me to print 500 pages in a single day, and I share a printer with ~35 similar people. There's nothing worse than waiting 25 minutes for someone else's 500 pages to print.
There's no time to put paper in, so you have to feed raw lumber in.
Ummm, can you say On Demand Bookstore? Powered by google!
We don't want it in minutes / War and Peace, we want it in Libraries of Congress / fortnight! Jeez, get with the times!
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
You're willing to pay $500k so you can save 25 minutes? Hello Mr. Gates! :)
Another poster posted this link:
printer description
There it says it can print 330 linear feet per minute - that's more than a thousand pages.
If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
to print one million dollars?
the summary doesn't say...
It can print Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in less than a minute
What about in terms of Library of Congresses?
"They couldn't just pull the plug on the printer array, as it'd take a day just to get the system back online."
Printing equipment the size of what IBM's showing has a big red kill switch. You know? Just in case you decide to fall in.
If you had RTFA, you'd have noticed that it's a laser printer - so if anything, it eats toner, not ink (and probably also other stuff, like imaging drums, transfer belts and so on).
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
So much for the paperless office !
You can get 22 ppm for about $600, at least that's what I saw on the first link from Froogle. So, if you want to print 1400 ppm you need roughly 64 of those. For $38,400 + the cost of some network hardware and software to manage it, and a little time you can get comparable page rates at laser quality. Let's say the added parts and labor of setting it up brings the total to $100,000. That's still a lot less than a million.
Really though, if I needed to print that much, I'd send stuff off to someone with an offset press and have them run the job.
So. What's the market for this thing?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Sadly, it only comes with a 250 sheet paper tray...
It sounds like there aren't a lot of /.ers that have worked in big iron shops. The replies to this article seems to have more inaccuracies than most.
The 4100 seems to be part of the evolution for "big iron" laser printers starting with the 3800. These printers started out being centralized printers to reduce cost per page for large organizations AND for billing organizations.
After the 1980s, I don't think a lot were sold to IT ("IS" at the time) organizations because having a single printer and distributing its output to different locations throughout a building is slow, expensive and time consuming - all the things using them was supposed to eliminate.
Where the printers really made their niche was generating bills for various organizations. The advantage of a laser printer over traditional printers was that traditional printers used pre-printed forms which were more expensive and had to be precisely lined up for the billing information to show up in the appropriate locations. The advantage of a laser printer in this application is that it can print all the background information, logos, terms and conditions, etc. just as quickly as a traditional printer just put in the differing information but at a much lower cost.
The 3800 and subsequent printers were/are the industry standard for these applications - very little of their output actually comes into the office except in the form of invoices from other companies.
When IBM spun off its printer division (known as "LexMark"), they did not sell of the big iron printers. They make a ton of money for IBM and also drive other purchases for IBM hardware.
It's probably more difficult now to see these monsters in action, but if you get the chance you should take a look - they are amazing. The old 3800s could print an entire 10" high box of 8.5 by 11 fanfold paper in just a few minutes and while cutting the paper appropriately. The "high end" models mentioned probably have letter stuffing hardware so the final output is a nice neat stack of bills all ready for shipment to the post office.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
"How large are 'normal' corporate printers?"
Put it this way -- I was watching the movie "Dune" and when the Guild navigator arrived in the throne room in that huge environmental chamber with the guild novices marching on either side, my first thought was to look for an "IBM Printing Systems Division" logo...
It would be pretty cool to be able to go into your local bookstore - which would keep just one copy of every book - and therefore be much smaller - and have your book printed on the spot.
When you find the book you want, they'd print and bind it on the spot - with a handful of these machines at every store, they could have you outta there in a couple of minutes...giving you time to visit the in-store coffee shop.
Books that are rarely purchased would still be available - they'd never 'go out of print' - although you'd have to browse on a computer instead of picking up a physical book to look at.
Ideally, you'd be able to choose the page size, font size, paper and binding quality that you prefer and choose how you want it bound (spiral, etc)...costs being set appropriately.
That would be *cool*.
www.sjbaker.org
the insurance company i work for just bought two of these behemoths... pretty impressive up close. they eat 5-foot tall paper spools.
IBM has a history of providing high performance printing systems. For instance, the IBM 3800 printer, introduced in 1975, could already print 20,000 lines per minute.
Are you one of those people who get the 500-page report each morning, flip to page 3, highlight line 2, and then toss the rest into the recycling bin?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Do you need to combine them?
Think of a bank producing bank statements, as long as all the pages for one customer come out the same machine, it doesn't matter that the statement for another customer is sitting on the out tray at the other side of the room.
Oooh they lure you in with a cheap printer and THEN nail you with the ink/toner costs.
Oh yeah IBM... I'm gonna buy your $500,000 printer and then go to a 3rd party toner provider!
That'll show you!
A new storage for pr0n, faster than burning a lot of CDs!
http://www.michel.eti.br
Um, print the first 50 pages on printer #1
print the 2nd 50 on printer #2
etc-- when done, put output from printer#1 on top of output from printer #2
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Personally, I think it's more fun to put a 50+ page document in random order and include a sticky note saying "Some assembly required." on the top page.
Hey everyone, the printer's not 330 pages per minute; its 330 feet per minute. Please see http://www.printers.ibm.com/internet/wwsites.nsf/v wwebpublished/4100home_ww.
;-)
Quoting IBM: Print at up to 330 linear feet (100.6 m) per minute (1,440 2-up duplex letter impressions or 1,354 2-up A4 duplex impressions).
I had a discussion with a friend that works in that division on Friday when this machine was announced. Apparently, 330 pages per minute was done about 30 years ago according to him (I have no idea what model, when it was, or anything else). Whoever wrote the initial story assumed whoever wrote the press release goofed and wrote feet when they obviously meant pages.
This model of printer is designed to print on a roll of paper which is approximately 19.5" wide. The roll is then cut and collated by other machines.
~ Mike
Michael C. Hollinger
Death by papercuts...
Double plus ungood.
This will be perfect once you download LibraryOfCongess.zip from Kazaa.
"*grin*"? What is this, an AOL chatroom?
Hey, remember this is IBM, not HP or Lexmark. :-)
:-)
;-)
As I posted earlier, its a 1440 ppm printer:
Print at up to 330 linear feet (100.6 m) per minute (1,440 2-up duplex letter impressions or 1,354 2-up A4 duplex impressions). - IBM
That works out to be about 4.364 pages per foot. With that in mind, the cheapest box of toner costs $437.48, according to the supplies page. That carton contains 4 cassettes, each of which is capable of 100,000 feet.
4 x 100,000 x 4.364 = 1,745,600 pages @ $437.48 in toner, or $0.00025 per page.
Of course, that fails to include other consumables, all of which I imagine are important, but I'm replying to a joke poster so I'm sure you all get my point and simply don't care.
~ Mike
Michael C. Hollinger
The point was that it could print a book that fast, and a book has ordered pages.
You'd actually need 44 33ppm printers. The summary is wrong - its 1440 ppm, 330 FEET per minute.
Obviously War & Peace is WAY more than 330 pages (unless the pages are very big, or the print is teeny-tiny small...
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
can print Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in less than a minute
This doesn't make sense. Please use standard metrics like how many times it can print the libraries of congress per unit of time.
My karma ran over your dogma
1,440ppm!
SCO will be able to use this when then publish their 'millions of line of code' found in Linux. Obviously IBM will charge them $10,000,000 for it...
The Univ. of Washington used several printers like this as well. One was in the Academic Computing Center. Why? Well, many researchers like having hardcopy of their datasets. So, you schedule your job, supply a budget number to charge it, and run it. In the time it would take you to walk down there from the Physics or Oceanography buildings, your 2-ream print job is probably sitting in the cubbyhole for you to get.
The main one used there was a Xerox printer, and it was also the preferred printer for printing out things like manuals, etc. It did just fine printing PS at 60 ppm as it did DVI or text.
The main IT center up north had at least two also, which were used to print invoices, student billing, grades, etc. They had very little downtime...
I think Health Sciences/UWMC had their own IBM 3800 printer as well.
This is 1991-era memory, though. I'm sure it is much different now, except that the Burroughs A10/A15 mainframes are probably still in use.
Uh, 1440 two-up duplex letter-size pages per minute. That's 5760 letter-size page impressions per minute! And keep in mind that a lot of print-on-demand books (the target market, presumably) are smaller than letter-size, and few are larger.
This is a scary fast printer.
They said it takes a little under 4 minutes to print War & Peace. @330ppm, that's a bit short of 1320 pages, which is about right for War & Peace.
Damn...whoops...I'm wrong. Many other posts are right. I'd consider blaming TFA, which appears to be poorly put together (it is CNN, after all), but I didn't pull all the facts together correctly myself. *shrug*
you could use that baby for assasination by paper cut.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
To err is human, but to really fsck up requires a computer.
..........FULL STOP.
without prejudice
Check about a page down from the top of the comments.
Sorry man.
Why not simply buy fifteen CHEAP Samsung laser printers and spool off to them in parallel. That would give you 22*15=330ppm for only 15*$60=$900. This is less than 1/1000th the cost of IBM's printer, and apparently performs just as well. Am I missing something?
Google Images search
10100111001
They compare its dimensions to those of an SUV. Given therefore that it's the size of a small industrial printing press, how impressive is 330 fpm?
Stop electronic paper before it hits the market?
I'm pretty sure it'll be infinitely cheaper...
Does CNN expect us to know such weird units as Empire Sstate Buldings/minute for printed works? For similarly confused by the article, in more familiar units, the new printer achives speeds of about 1 LOC/year.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
My Epson C45s can do twenty pages a minute in black and white and they're easy to refill and cost fifty bucks a piece with warranty. Giant automatic refill cartridges are avaialbe all the way up to gallon size if you know where to shop. Note, that's automatic as in the machine hydraulically feeds directly out of the big bottle as opposed to you need to use a syrings to fill the cartridges. You're talking hundreds of thousands of pages per gallon. You will definitely fry the drive belts before you run out of ink.
Printing just happens to be incredibly well suited to distributed jobs so I think fifty Epson C45s and a set of off-the-shelf multi-port USB print servers would to the same job at a tiny fraction of the cost both up front and in terms of consumeables.
Indeed, fifty Epson C45s modified with giant ink tanks in addition to a brand new Dell PC dedicated to each printer would still cost much less and produce a thousand pages a minute. For a half million dollars I would expect at least ten thousand pages a minute in full color.
As for the printer:
$1M (In-Store Price) - $500K (Instant Gift Rebate) - $500K (Mail-In Rebate) = $0*
*Rebate Offer Does Not Refund the Sales Tax Paid by the Customer. Rebate Offer Must be combined with $10M mainframe. Limit 1 per customer. Offer not valid in combination with any other offers.
Charles Jo
Ok, maybe I'm missing something. This is not a 330 page per minute nor a 1440 page per minute printer as I calculate it.
As my emphasis above points out above it is printing 1440 2-up duplex pages. That means 1440/2/2 = 360 pages per minute.
Someone did post 360 ppm earlier but the errors seem to keep going.
Now I suppose if you are counting "printed pages per minute" you would say that it is capable of 1440 printed pages per minute outputed at a rate of 360 paper pages per minute. I have not read the article and it does say it handles the pagination externally so does this mean that the print job is 1440 regular pages but the printer does the 2-up and duplex pagination plus prints the job at 360 pages per minute...I suppose so.
I won't argue with the rest of your math.
Oh and here is a link to a page with all the detailed specs including pricing.
TPM or Trees Per Minute
How long before IBM can have a dot matrix version sent to Guantanamo Bay? Forget about torturing them with Christina Aguilera - 330ppm of dot matrix should be enough to crack anyone.
If IBM could help the Department Of Fatherland Security (S.S.) surely, helping the Department Of Homeland Security is a matter of patriotic duty?
thats one hell of a jam in tray 2
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything" -- Josef Stalin
Would that be a log-jam?
This is actually shitty performance. I've worked around laser printers to know that at a million dollars could buy many less speedy printers that can be used in a cluster mode. What happens to that million dollars when it breaks? I have to wait for the HIGH priced IBM tech to arrive, as usually they'll be under a support aggrement and could take upto next day for service to occur.
If it was clustered I could at least have some printing being performed while I wait for the tech to arrive.
You have to be joking, right?
These printers are used as part of an document management workflow, you just can't go put a bank of workgroup printers in it's place and have the same effect. First of all, it's economies of scale, yes it is *MUCH**MUCH* cheaper to print on an Infoprint 4100 than a farm of workgroup printers (the TCOP, total cost of printing, doesn't even come anywhere close when we are talking the volumes these things run). Duty cycles, the list goes on!
Besides, these printers don't live as an island, they have pre and post processing to manage the document (statement, inserted documents, insert into envelope, bind into document, whatever).
Could you imagine how much man power it would take to take statements from a cutsheet workgroup printer and do the same thing? Ewww...
But what about the mileage? (miles of paper per gallon of ink)
A Redundant Array of Inexpensive Printers is a great idea, sans the fact that the acronym is RAIP.
"Hey new guy, we need someone to configure our new RAIP system. Want to go in the back office and check it out?"
Stop the presses (pardon the pun, you know someone had to say it) but it can print 330 pages per minute and in the /. article it says that it can run a copy of War and Peace in under a minute? Come again? War and Peace is 1408 pages long, and if this thing can do 330 ppm and supposedly can print a copy of War and Peace in UNDER a minute? Is anyone else struggling with the math here?
Half the size of an SUV and over 300 sheets/minute. IBM must have done a super job of miniaturizing all those scribes and monks inside it.
Now they have a printer that can print out all the material SCO has requested through discovery as fast as SCO requests it :)