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*

Comments

Sure it can print out 330 pages a minute

[Anonymous Coward]

But can YOU change ink that fast?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:But....

[p0ppe]

http://www.printers.ibm.com/internet/wwsites.nsf/v wwebpublished/4100home_ww
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/

Re:head spinning

[cms108]

yep... 330 pages per minute would be a bit crap if you'd paid a million quid for a printer.

but from the article... "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 it actually prints at 330 feet per minute... which works out at about 1440 pages per minute. which is a bit better.

Back before my day

[jmichaelg]

Back in the mid 60's my brother-in-law was in Naval Intelligence and got a plum posting at Pearl Harbor. They had an IBM line printer that churned out paper by printing entire lines at a time. The printer had a row of 132 wheels and each wheel had each character the printer could strike. To print an "A" in column 5, the 5th wheel would spin until an "A" was opposite the paper. When all 132 wheels were ready, the whole row of wheels would strike the paper. As you might imagine, it made quite a racket.

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.

Re:oh goody

[Psiren]

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...

Re:Printers these fast are very dangerous.

[stienman]

Print admins should have had a process in place to place jobs that required more than an estimated 500 pages into an administrative approval queue.

They probably do now...

-Adam

Re:oh goody

[AnomaliesAndrew]

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.