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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?
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
Weren't we all promised that at the dawn of computing?
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...
And great news for rainforests, too.
They don't use rainforrests for making paper. The biggest problem the rainforrests face is burning to make farms and grazing land.
http://Lenny.com
http://www.printers.ibm.com/internet/wwsites.nsf/v wwebpublished/4100home_ww
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/
"Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
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.
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 get enough junk mail, and the forests of our planet dont need anothe reason to be cut down.
You're right of course. Maybe if they could find some other way to send out this marketing material. Some means of sending it electronically perhaps...
I work at a junkmail factory (as an in-house enterprise solution developer). We produce, personalize, and mail between 6 and 9 million pieces of mail every day of the year. We're already using "outdated" multi-color inkjet technology that prints over 1000ft per minute at over 3ft wide and it works great. We have like 6 of these machines and they cost only like $100,000 each.
I didn't RTFA, but this seems almost as silly as Goodyear anncouncing they've developed a new "fossil fuel internal combustion powerwed 4-wheeled personnel carrier" for $90,000 when there's already been cars on the market for years at ~$15,000.
Nothing to see here. I'm serious.
Move all sig!
According to IBM that's feet, not pages, and it prints duplex: "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)."
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
To add to that. They actually grow tree farms for the purpose of making paper. Because of paper we have more trees.
Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
Well, you can always use your unsolicited mail from some companies to harass other companies by stuffing it into the pre-paid envelopes they like to send you.
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
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!
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
I work at a junkmail factory
Die. I didn't RTFA, but
Die, die, DIE!
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
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.
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
To err is human, but to really fsck up requires a computer.
..........FULL STOP.
Despite the fact that some (not all) of trees used for paper-making comes from tree farms, there are still problems with the paper industry as a whole. Here are a few paragraphs from an, IMO, interesting article:
Paper Made from Timber
Think bundling your newspapers is "messy"? Not when compared with the process of making paper from virgin timber. While modern paper recycling mills can be designed to operate without producing any hazardous air or water pollution and virtually no hazardous wastes,[16] the virgin pulp and paper industry is one of the world's largest generators of toxic air pollutants, surface water pollution, sludge, and solid wastes. A recent assessment of the virgin timber-based papermaking industry concluded that reducing hazardous discharges at paper mills worldwide to safe levels would cost $27 billion.[17] Indeed, the timber industry has in all likelihood wiped out more habitat and more species per unit of production than has any other industry. Most Americans associate virgin paper mills with both the destruction of resident-species habitat and the contamination of streams and rivers with chlorinated dioxins and other pollutants. But the fact is these mills are also major sources of a wide variety of hazardous air and water pollutants, odors, solid waste, contaminated sludge, and water discoloring agents. Besides their well known, often unbearable emissions of sulfur compounds (causing an odor resembling rotten eggs), pulp and paper mills are classified under U.S. federal law as generators of "significant quantities of Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) chlorinated and non-chlorinated. Some of these pollutants are considered to be carcinogenic, and all can cause toxic health effects following exposure. Most of the organic HAPs emitted from this industry also are classified as volatile organic compounds which participate in photochemical reactions in the atmosphere to produce ozone, a contributor to photochemical smog."[18]
Moreover, the virgin "pulp and paper industry is the largest industrial process water user in the United States. Approximately 1,551 billion gallons of wastewater are generated annually by pulp, paper, and paperboard manufacturers."[19] Water pollutants contained in these billions of gallons discharged into streams, rivers, and lakes by virgin paper manufacturers include a wide range of hazardous and conventional pollutants as well as volatile organic compounds, including chlorinated dioxins and furans, chloroform, absorbable organic halides [AOX], methylene chloride, trichlorophenols, and pentachlorophenols.[20]
Processing rigid stands of timber into flexible, printable, smooth, glossy (or absorbent) paper requires an intensive chemical and mechanical effort after a tree is harvested. Once roads have been cut into the forest to get to the timber, it is transported to the mill, stockpiled, debarked, chipped, "cooked" in vats of chemicals, and turned into pulp and bleached mechanically and chemically. Then the pulp must be turned into paper or dried and shipped off to another mill. While paper can be recycled even at very large mills using fewer than a dozen nonhazardous chemicals and bleaching solutions that contain, for example, 99.5 percent water and 0.5 percent hydrogen peroxide (a concentration more diluted than the peroxide in your medicine cabinet),[21] most virgin pulp and paper is made using literally hundreds of highly corrosive and hazardous chemicals, including chlorine. As the EPA has documented, this presents enormous problems in reducing pollution from virgin paper mills because "elimination of dioxin, furan, chlorinated phenolics, and other chlorinated organics [can]...not be achieved unless all forms of chlorine-based bleaching are eliminated."[22] This is not expected to happen in the United States for quite some time. In addition, not all of the toxic pollutants discharged in the wastewater produced by virgin pulp and paper mills are currently regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, including certain congeners of dioxin and furans and a range of chlorinated phenols.
Here is the source article.
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?