New Inkjet Technology 5 To 10 Times Faster

sarahbau writes "Silverbrook's new Memjet technology can print 60 full-color pages per minute. Instead of having a print head that moves side to side like current inkjets, the print head spans the full width of the page, containing 70,400 nozzles in the A4 version. They also have a large-format printer (51") that prints 6" to 1 foot per second. Products are expected to start shipping in late 2007: first a photo/label printer, then a home/office printer for less than $300 in 2008." The video is amazing. If it's for real, the technology would be disruptive at half the speed and twice the price.

Comments

Ink

[ByteSlicer]

With the cost of ink these days, one might as well use it to print sheets of money...

Re:Ink

[ravishjunk]

... and still at massive loss!

Re:Ink

[EggyToast]

It's been about 8 months since I gave up on inkjet as a technology. We'd been through about 6 printers over the past 6 years, some lasting longer than others, and would usually get one that was cheap-ish, but inevitably they would clog. Why? Because we didn't print every day. The last one was actually 2 printers as Canon replaced it for free. But if you went more than 2 weeks without printing anything, you were headed to clogsville.

Given that it would eat up a rather large portion of an ink cartridge to attempt to clean a clogged head, and inevitably we would pick up another set of ink cartridges in an attempt to fix it, that was $60 down the drain WAY too frequently.

We've since picked up a color laser printer, which plugs into our network with no fuss, and has printed about 5 times the number of pages at a fraction of the toner/ink use. Toner costs more, but if it lasts for years and years with no clogs and no loss in quality, we'll happily accept that charge. They're not as nice for photos, but that's what Shutterfly is for.

Re:Ink

[kestasjk]

I recently started using ink refills, where you inject fresh ink in using a syringe. It seems to be working fine so far, but I'll wait and see. Anyone else have any experience with this?

Re:Ink

[Tatarize]

Well on the bright side, this new printer will break other ways less often. The head doesn't move so no moving head problems. Though, to be fair, if you went several weeks without printing anything at the margins wouldn't the printer clog at the margin? Roughly, every part of the page has it's own printer head, isn't that going to let some of the heads stick without the others?

Re:Ink

[SCHecklerX]

Exactly why I bought a laserjet 2605dn. Bonus: I get postscript, built-in networking, duplexing, and a printer that works perfectly with cups after downloading the custom ppd.

If you want to print some pictures, just upload them to wal-mart or something. I don't know about everyone else, but pictures are not something I print a lot of, and many things I do print would quickly exhaust ink cartridges. And as the parent stated: clogged cartridges suck. Who as a home user uses their printer frequently enough to keep that from happening? This is not a problem with laserjet toner.

Re:Ink

[morgan_greywolf]

I use compatible cartridges. You can pick these up for the Epson or Canon inkjets at sites like www.inkco.us for as little $3-5 a cartridge for the 4-cartridge printers. For instance, my Epson Stylus C88 carts cost around $15 at Office Depot or OfficeMax, $35 for the black. So about $80 in carts if you buy the Epson OEM carts. But the compatibles run me about $5 a piece, black or color, so a full set only costs me about $20 + shipping. I use inkco in particular because they will ship via USPS regular mail, which is very cheap.

Re:Ink

[CastrTroy]

I completely agree. For the number of time I actually need color, I can just go down to the local print shop and have them print it out in better quality for less cost then I could do it for. If I want photos, i'll go to walmart or shoppers, or loblaws or blacks, or one of the 8 million other places that does digital prints. And for all my black and white needs, a laser printer does well. I can't think of a time that I've actually needed color prints at home. I mean, it's nice to have around, but it's totally not worth my time or money to upkeep an inkjet. And I still find color laser a little on the expensive side.

Re:Ink

[Hal_Porter]

Even tweakers don't try to inject ink with a syringe. You crazy bastard. Hope you're using a ink with a water soluble pigment.

Does it get you really fucked up though? Not that I'm interested or anything...

Re:Ink

[Frosty Piss]

But if you went more than 2 weeks without printing anything, you were headed to clogsville.

Nothing that a q-tip and a little alcohol can't fix.

Re:Ink

[MindStalker]

I've found I can generally get one refill at best two refills and it starts to print funny.

Re:Ink

[max8061]

Fibers from the cotton will snag and destroy print heads.

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing that a q-tip and a little alcohol can't fix.

The alcohol is for after you get fired for buying a shitty printer. The q-tip ... well, I'm not really into that.

Re:Ink

[t00le]

If you are paying $60 for refills you should have your head examined. I have went through two Canon's in the last seven years and pay a whopping $10 for refills. If you live in a somewhat large city there should be a Cartridge World (cartridgeworldusa.com)in your neighborhood. I can't imagine paying $60 for refills since I refuse to buy into the Razor/Blades business model. Before you ask I have an electric razor. :)

Re:Ink

[FuzzyDaddy]

We've made a similar transition. For years I had an Epson 740i, for which I bought inexpensive third party ink cartridges. Well, it broke eventually, and I couldn't find another one for love or money. So I bought another inkjet. The ink was outrageously expensive, so we bit the bullet and bought an inexpensive laser printer. (~$250 for the printer and a full cartridge).

We don't print color anymore - our printer was never that good for color photos anyway.

The lesson: the cost of a printing technology can be easily dominated by the cost of the consumables!

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you're choosing to print the wrong denomination and currency.

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

I made infrequent use of an HP-500 inkjet for years with no problems. I now have a Cannon photo printer, and while I haven't had it very long, it hasn't shown any signs of difficulty yet. This leads me to suspect that this is a quality-of-printer issue more than an "all inkjets suck" issue. Considering that the real cost is in consumables anyway, maybe it's worth not buying printers that are "cheap-ish"?

Of course, the documentation for my Canon is clear that the print head will eventually clog and fail, at which time the print head (not the entire printer) will need replacement. Once I see how often that happens, I'll factor it in to my per-page cost.

All that said, I certainly agree that any particular type of printer (or even any printer at all) is a tool that some people benefit from having, but not everybody. Like many things computer-related, it's common for most people to assume they need one without having thought through what they'll do with it.

For many uses, a color laser (if you can stomach the up-front cost) is a good way to go. I went with a black-and-white HP laser and a color inkjet -- even though I wasn't sure how much use I'd get from the inkjet -- simply to give myself more flexibility in what I could do. (That, and because I got a really good deal on the inkjet anyway...)

Turns out to have been a good move for me, IMO. I started on a fundraising campaign in January and have been able to produce high-quality materials at home rather than having to run out to a print shop. Sure, if I provided designs that met their specs they could do higher-volume runs faster and cheaper -- but then I don't need high volume. They couldn't really provide higher quality, and this way I don't have to walk to the print shop or pay for a cab ride (I don't drive on account of vision).

Re:Ink

[zakezuke]

With the cost of ink these days, one might as well use it to print sheets of money...

TFA - Silverbrook has forecast printing costs for the 60 page per minute desktop printer at below $0.02 for black text, and under $0.06 for color pages (with 20 percent ink coverage), according to Lyra Research, which had early access to prototypes.

This is pretty reasonable, and actually is onpar with many lasers. This is slightly cheaper than US model Canons which used the BCI-3e pigmented black cartridge and the HPs which used the #45a pigmented black cartridge.

TFA - The desktop printer's individual color ink cartridges hold 50ml of ink, an almost unprecedented amount in a consumer product, and will sell for less than $20 each, the company predicts.

Again, this is pretty dang reasonable. While you can not accuratly judge output volume by tank size alone. Canons for example tend to be ink hogs, where epsons tend to print more efficently but waste ink with their pump suction action... a hazzard of using micropiezo heads rather than thermal. But volume wise this is up there with the HP Business Jet class.

It's not clear in TFA if this is thermal or micropiezo, but given the price point, odds are it's a thermal, which in all fairness is somewhat limiting in the ink used. Odds are it's water based dye, which does a good enough job.

But like others i've switched to using bulk ink. That would be the real question... whether they would permit bulk refills.

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody said it should be US money.

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

The inkjet clogging makes random use a bit laborious but it is not necessarily impossible or expensive.

I have a Canon inkjet printer, which like any other similar device clogs after couple of weeks without printing. I use it for short periods every few months. There's no point trying to print anything directly after long period of inactivity because the print head is definately clogged. Instead, I start by removing the inks and taking out the print head. I clean it with electronics cleaning fluid, rubbing it vigorously with cotton sticks and then drying it with a toilet paper. After that treatment it has always worked well enough. Although I may not get all nozzles always fully working, the print quality is fine.

The manual warns about touching the print head in any way and instructs cleaning it only by shooting ink through it. With severely clogged print head, shooting the ink doesn't really help at all. Wasting ink and replacing print heads is expensive and doesn't keep my printer working. Of course it is the only solution acceptable for Canon as they get their income by selling the inks and print heads. Obeying their warnings, I would have paid several times the price of the printer and still fail to print when I need to.

I don't want to put down Canon: this propably applies equally to other brands. ...and Canon is still my favourite brand in cameras.

For frequent photo printing I use a photo printing service instead of inkjet. A good service is a lot easier to use, considerably cheaper and the prints are more durable.

Re:Ink

[Captain Splendid]

If you want to print some pictures, just upload them to wal-mart or something. I don't know about everyone else, but pictures are not something I print a lot of, and many things I do print would quickly exhaust ink cartridges. And as the parent stated: clogged cartridges suck. Who as a home user uses their printer frequently enough to keep that from happening? This is not a problem with laserjet toner.

Game over, SCHecklerX wins the thread.

Seriously, why are we even having these conversations any more? Ooh, a new way to clog up your ink cartridges! Mod me troll if you want, but why we're still debating (heh! not even, it's DEAD!) the pros and cons of inkjet technology is beyond me.

To recap: You want to print a little? Spend the money on an LJ, becuase an underused IJ clogs up.
You want to print a lot? Spend the money on an LJ, because it's more cost-effective.
Want to print pictures? Go to Wal-mart like the man said.

Come on folks, do yourselves a favour: take your inkjets out to a field somewhere, crank the Rap tunes up to 11 and have at 'em with a baseball bats. You know you want to.

Re:Ink

[drinkypoo]

You want to print a lot? Spend the money on an LJ, because it's more cost-effective.

Here's the problem with that statement; if you can find an inkjet without a banding problem, it often has output as good as or even superior to a high-end laser printer. The best computer photo prints I've seen have all come from inkjet printers, not laser printers.

In fact, just behind me and a bit to the left is a Laserjet 5550. This is a five thousand dollar printer, give or take a grand, if you load it up with RAM. The cost to replace all the toner? You might be able to get it cheaper elsewhere, but buying HP carts from CDW, which is what we do, costs literally $1300 for a full set. The cost per page is something like 26 cents if you're printing an average sheet with something like 20% coverage.

If you get a Canon inkjet with a continuous inker and just buy ink refills, then you can probably beat that quite handily. And you can probably get the printer for under $300 for the whole schmeer. Problem is, it's slow as hell compared to the big fat laser. But if you had an inkjet with a full-width head, you could solve that problem, too. And in the bargain you'd get rid of the high-powered electronics, the carcinogenic toner and fumes (which they very much are, especially from colored toners) and the gigantic printer.

The head clogging is a problem. Unless they have that solved, this printer is a non-starter. But I don't think it's an insoluble problem. In fact, maybe the answer is a cleaning solution (nyuk nyuk) and an embedded ultrasonic transducer. Recycled inkjet cartridge nozzles are cleaned with some kind of detergent or something, I don't even know what, but they're done with an ultrasonic washer to break up the bits of ink without touching the nozzles, which are of course very very small.

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

there needs to be an investigation into the pricing of ink, ink by itself shouldn't cost as much as it does. I'm not going to be a victim by purchasing a printer and getting raped on ink. I think publishing houses want high consumer ink prices.

Re:Ink

[empaler]

My boss insists on inkjet and cheap "compatible" ink. Woot.

Re:Ink

[QuickFox]

It's much cheaper than the street stuff, and you get your hallucinations in cyan, magenta, yellow and black!

Re:Ink

[Doctor Memory]

if you can find an inkjet without a banding problem, it often has output as good as or even superior to a high-end laser printer. The best computer photo prints I've seen have all come from inkjet printers, not laser printers. Depends on the paper you use. If you're printing photos on the proper photo-quality paper, then the inkjet wins hands down. OTOH, if you're like me and typically buy whatever paper's cheapest at the grocery store because I've run out at 11:30 at night, you tend to get varying results. Laser printers (my Lexmark, anyway) tend to give more consistent results across varying paper grades. I have actually chosen to submit a diagram-laden document I printed on the laser over a copy I printed on the inkjet, because the color diagrams saturated the paper to the point that it got "wavy" (and there was some discernable bleeding).

Re:Ink

[Your Pal Dave]

I made infrequent use of an HP-500 inkjet for years with no problems. I now have a Cannon photo printer, and while I haven't had it very long, it hasn't shown any signs of difficulty yet. This leads me to suspect that this is a quality-of-printer issue more than an "all inkjets suck" issue. Considering that the real cost is in consumables anyway, maybe it's worth not buying printers that are "cheap-ish"? Maybe it has something to do do with climate. I had a HP-500 series which was continually drying out. I don't think I ever actually emptied a cartridge without it drying first. (and no, alcohol and swabs don't do a damn bit of good!) Thing is, I live in Colorado, so the humidity is low and the altitude is high, both of which could promote cartridge drying.

Re:Ink

[Frosty Piss]

Fibers from the cotton will snag and destroy print heads.

Doesn't bother my cartridges all that much. They have a limited lifespan anyway. Maybe you're using the wrong kind of swabs...

Re:Ink

[Ecuador]

Hmm, I have the oposite experience. I have been using inkjet since about 1996, when I got my first HP inkjet. I don't remember the model, I think it was 690 or something like that. It was a crappy printer and after a year or so it stopped being able to pull the paper from the tray. If I recall this was a common problem of the HP's of the era. Anyway, I got an Epson Color 400 to replace it (probably 1998). At first I would buy genuine ink, but it was kind of expensive so I switched to grey market and even refills (the latter were inferior though). I was a student, so I would print probably a paper every week, more during the finals and usually nothing during the summer. The printer never failed, simply when I moved (in 2003) I left it with my parents and got a used Epson C60 for $10 off a fleamarket. I buy ink from ebay (my last batch was 5-pack for less than $20) and it is 2007, I am no longer a student and print most stuff in my office, so I print something like an ebook per month. Maybe you didn't get good printers? For example Canons were known for being less expensive (esp. their ink), not for being good.

Re:Ink

[bobcat7677]

Yep yep, I went 100% laser a while back too. Now I frequently wonder why I spent so many years of frusteration spending unmentionable amounts of money and time with those stupid inkjet printers. And yes, I tried "professional" series printers and the like. I may be wrong, but I really don't think a consumer level inkjet printer could ever be made with a competitive TCO...especially with lasers having gotten much cheaper. Ribbion was good in it's day, Wax Thermal is pretty good, but dry toner is still the best option.

Re:Ink

[rolfwind]

Why would anyone want to use ink, even for photos? Just to have it smear? Inkjets doesn't even look that good imo.

For photos, go for a dye sublimination printer, like this company offers:

http://www.hitouchimaging.com/

They work well. Plus no ink that dries/clogs when it isn't used for a couple weeks.

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. Bought a very lightly used HP laserjet (an old one from the days where they were built like tanks -- it's rated to print 25k pages a month, with a warranty of 3 years, i.e. 900k pages). A 35$ HP branded toner lasts 6800 pages or about 13 of those 500 page packs. Cheaper if I buy off-brand or refilled toners. The most expensive part is cheap paper -- quite a change from using inkjets! (You don't hear inkjet users complain about the price of paper often eh?)

The only color thing I used to print were photos, and now if I want some printed, I get them done by a good lab (good old silver halide process on real fuji photo paper). Far better photos that last (and no nasty dots - continuous tones, and it's color calibrated). And 99% of what I printed (B&W text) looks far better than with an inkjet, and doesn't smear. No more running out of ink all the time, no more buying 50$ cartridges that clog all the time (I never manage to unclog them, even using alcohol).

And like any old laserjet, it's well supported by *ANY* OS at all. Windows, Linux, or anything else (could use WordPerfect 5.1 DOS no problem). Does PCL and PostScript. No GDI-based junk. Easy to network. Want replacement parts? They're easy to find and dirt cheap. I've got the service manual too. Want extra RAM for it? No need to pay ridiculous amounts for a memory upgrade -- just plain old memory from a 486 works great (can even be found on ebay around 10$ for 64MB).

Yes, it's ugly, but it's as cheap as it gets, works great, and a true work horse.

I'm never buying an inkjet ever again. I've had several (3 HP, 4 Epson, 2 Canon, 2 Lexmark -- and not the cheap models), and they all sucked beyond belief, heads always clogged, ink was always expensive, and they all ended up being more trouble than they were worth. I wish I had never even bothered with them. What an absolute waste of time and money!

Re:Ink

[drinkypoo]

I only print black and white, so I have a laser printer (2100 with a jetdirect card) because I wanted a network printer that was rebuildable (pickup rollers etc) that had a fast print speed and I don't care about color. I print things out because I need the information away from a PC, not because I want to preserve them. In my world, digtal data lasts longer than paper even if it's on a cheapass CDRW.

Re:Ink

[sleigher]

yeah but the electric never gets as close as a blade. NEVER!

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

> The head clogging is a problem.
> ...
> But I don't think it's an insoluble problem.

I'd have thought that ink clogging would be the very definition of an insoluble problem...

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

Re:Ink

[ncc74656]

It's been about 8 months since I gave up on inkjet as a technology. We'd been through about 6 printers over the past 6 years, some lasting longer than others, and would usually get one that was cheap-ish, but inevitably they would clog. Why? Because we didn't print every day. The last one was actually 2 printers as Canon replaced it for free. But if you went more than 2 weeks without printing anything, you were headed to clogsville.

That's been my experience with an Epson Stylus Photo R200. I had long avoided Epsons because of bad experience keeping the demo printers in good working order back when I wore the blue shirt, but they're the only game in town for printing on CDs and DVDs (unless you want to spend $300+, or are OK with the monochrome thermal-transfer disc printers from Casio). I've had to send mine away for service once so far, and even after 3-4 cleaning cycles, there are some nozzles that still won't clear. Printing discs in best-quality mode minimizes the appearance of problems, so that's what I usually end up doing.

OTOH, I have an HP DeskJet 450wbt that is still running on its original color cartridge (I think I've had to replace the black cartridge once after it ran out) after about a year and a half. It gets used twice a year at homebrew competitions, and sporadically in between. The last time I used it, I didn't even need to run the cleaning cycle first; it spit out a flawless test page right off the bat, after having sat idle for 3-4 months. It definitely cost more than most inkjet printers (being a portable printer with a battery and Bluetooth for 100% wireless operation will do that, but you could save ~$100 by leaving those off), but it's been one of the better inkjet printers I've bought. It works like a champ with Linux, too, over both Bluetooth and USB, and HPLIP reads ink level and battery charge when connected over USB.

Re:Ink

[Maxo-Texas]

The problem with inkjets is that they can stand almost no downtime.

I too use a color laser (Samsung 500).

Toner was expensive- but I haven't refilled it a couple years after refilling the 1500 page cartridges it came with.

It can sit for days- weeks- at least once for a couple months, and then when I decide to print something- it just works.

When you can get black & white laser printers for under $100 now, there is just no excuse not to have one for your typical document printing.

I suppose the dye sublimation printers may also be reliable since they are also from solid inks.

Plus all the other benefits of laser (no/very slow fading! completely waterproof!)

Ink jets are good for things like iron on patches I guess. Or if you print all day every day.

Still- not sure if a $30 ink jet cartridge does as many pages as a $115 laser (5k pages).

Just the fact they can't rate the number of pages for ink jet tells me something.

Re:Ink

[modecx]

Maybe it has something to do do with climate. I had a HP-500 series which was continually drying out. I don't think I ever actually emptied a cartridge without it drying first. (and no, alcohol and swabs don't do a damn bit of good!) Thing is, I live in Colorado, so the humidity is low and the altitude is high, both of which could promote cartridge drying.

I also live in Colorado, and my desktop printer's cartridges wouldn't dry up so much as just clog very rapidly. Ever since I put in a humidifier so that my nose wouldn't bleed all the time (just too damned dry), my printer doesn't clog during relatively long periods of non-use. It's Magic, I tells ya!

Re:Ink

[cpt.hugenstein]

Doing that you would still end up in the red, until your magenta cartridge ran out that is.

Re:Ink

[ncc74656]

In fact, just behind me and a bit to the left is a Laserjet 5550. This is a five thousand dollar printer, give or take a grand, if you load it up with RAM. The cost to replace all the toner? You might be able to get it cheaper elsewhere, but buying HP carts from CDW, which is what we do, costs literally $1300 for a full set. The cost per page is something like 26 cents if you're printing an average sheet with something like 20% coverage.

We bought a Color LaserJet 3800dn for the office a while back. It's a little slower (22 ppm vs. 27) and the duty cycle is a lower (65k pages vs. 120k), but it was only about $1300 (with the duplexer and print server) and a full set of toner cartridges is about $650.

I don't know what kind of printing you're doing that results in 20% coverage. Ours is just typical office printing--manuals, source code, some images, etc. The stats webpage from our printer says we're averaging 3.5% black, 0.7% cyan, 0.6% magenta, and 0.5% yellow. We're getting about 8500 pages from the black cartridges and 13000 pages from the color cartridges, which works out to about 1.5 cents for a black page and 5.5 cents for a color page.

Re:Ink

[hcdejong]

If you print at two-week intervals, yes. If the interval gets longer, there comes a point where no amount of cleaning fluids will unclog the heads. I've ruined an Epson printer and several HP cartridges by not using them for 4 months. I tried cleaning with increasingly aggressive materials (water, alcohol, paint thinner iirc) without success.

Re:Ink

[ncc74656]

Wow...I'm a tard. :-| I didn't notice that the 5550 also prints up to tabloid size. The 3800, of course, only prints up to legal size (and ours has only had letter-size run through it).

Re:Ink

[hcdejong]

Yup, same here. Except I stopped bothering with printers 10 years ago, when I got out of college. With no more papers to hand in in dead tree format, I found I rarely printed anything anymore. If the information is in a computer, I prefer viewing it on screen to printing it.
I kept the printer I had then for a few more years, but it just sat gathering dust so I tossed it eventually. Same with another printer I got for free with a second-hand computer. So I haven't had a printer at home for about 5 years now, and good riddance.
For the ~5 letters I write in a year, I just use a laser printer at the office.

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, just behind me and a bit to the left is a Laserjet 5550. This is a five thousand dollar printer, give or take a grand, if you load it up with RAM. The cost to replace all the toner? You might be able to get it cheaper elsewhere, but buying HP carts from CDW, which is what we do, costs literally $1300 for a full set. The cost per page is something like 26 cents if you're printing an average sheet with something like 20% coverage Wow... you or your company really are stupid. $0.26 per sheet!? Hey, I have a bridge to sell you.

Ever hear of these new things called maintenance contracts? We pay $0.065 per sheet for toner, drums and maintenance and the machine cost less than $10000 (you can lease too). We have a Konica/Minolta, but companies offer the same thing for HP products.

Sorry for calling you stupid... I'm just shocked!

Re:Ink

[drinkypoo]

I don't know what kind of printing you're doing that results in 20% coverage.

Oh no, I said 20% coverage was normal use. Most of MY jobs have 100% coverage, because they have colored backgrounds.

Most of them are short runs, so they would still cost more if sent out to be printed outside.

Re:Ink

[GregPK]

I have to call this out for inaccurate information.
Get a calculator and check HP cartridge yields again which is 12000 pages per cartridge at a price of 315 a piece if bought seperately and from CDW they sell it bundle deal for 250 a piece which would drp your total costs by at least 2 cents a sheet. Printers that high in price are far cheaper to print with. An inkjet generally runs around 26-40 cents a sheet for color printing even using refills. That HP 5550 costs around 2.6 to 9 cents a sheet at full retail pricing. There is a reason to spend more money for the high end color laser printers. Its because they are just simply cheaper to print with.

Re:Ink

[drinkypoo]

Er, sorry, I meant 2.6. Dropping the . is important! But then you have to multiply by 5 because most of my pages have full coverage. And it's actually 3.2 cents per page color. So it's about 16 cents per page. Seriously, I almost never print anything without 100% coverage. (We have this satin-background look these days and it's hell on toner.)

Re:Ink

[afxgrin]

hahahaha

Go take a look at a HP 2000C or the line based on that design. The ink cartridges supply print heads using think supply line tubes. These can eventually clog due to the ink drying in the supply line. It's not that common of a problem, but I've seen it happen enough. That printer uses 4 supply lines for each colour, I can only imagine how ink is supplied to this wide, multi nozzle beast. And by the way, many print heads that have micro nozzles will just get damaged or clogged when you run that q-tip across the print head. This will cause larger variations in the ink drop size causing improper colour mixing, OR banding from cotton filled nozzles. You want to use a lint free cloth and a little water (alcohol if it's particularly bad), dragging the wet cloth across the print head.

Re:Ink

[Keith Duhaime]

Ditto! I have a HP 2605dn as well. Great home office machine. As for photos, my wife is into printing those, and for that she heads down to London Drugs.

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds exactly like us (even got a 2605dn about two months ago). Gone through two or three inkjet printers and one laser printer in 11 years. When the laser died I found that I missed it. It well while it worked, but a LaserWriter II NT wasn't going to be useable with OS X since it required localtalk and so was not worth fixing. Insteat it seemed that either the inkjet that replaced always had dried out ink. Unless I printed once a week it wouldn't print until I wasted a ton of ink cleaning the head. $30 to $60 a shot depending of if I wanted just black or color also. Finally at this paste new year I started looking around to see what it would take to get a network ready laser. Found a good deal on a 2605dn (duplexing rocks) and bought it. The only problem so far is that you have to have laser printer specific labels and photo paper (photos come out better than the last printer, and nearly as good as what we get from Ritz). Yeah toner is expensive, but it prints 2,000 pages. It is a large printer, but I have a nice shelf in the closet with the servers in the office. I must say I don't miss the laserwrite II nt anymore. It was missed right up until I bought another laser. With prices coming done on all laser printers, I don't see why I would buy another inkjet for a general printer. Unless you want to print high quality photos that are better printed by Ritz, Longs Drug, Shutterfly, etc. the work much better.

Re:Ink

[Grishnakh]

Yeah, but the problem is that US money is the only one that can feasibly be counterfeited with a printer. All the other countries have far more advanced anti-counterfeiting technologies, such as different colors, plastic windows, holograms, etc. The US sticks a lousy watermark on their bills and thinks that's enough.

Re:Ink

[cheater512]

Your forgetting the obvious one. Making them out of plastic.

Far more durable, cheap, easy to put the plastic windows in and very difficult to counterfeit.

Re:Ink

[cheater512]

We have a multifunction Inkjet with Wifi, Networking, etc...
Never had a problem with it.

I dont know what everyone is saying about clogging. I've never had it happen ever.
And yes the printer isnt used much.

Re:Ink

[RobertM1968]

Keep in mind a few things. Regular "printer maintenance" is easy when it comes to preventing print head clogs. Just Chron or schedule a one page document print with the right content (something similar to an alignment sheet print) every couple of weeks.

As for ink costs... I am pretty sure a unit like this (or at least like the larger format versions) would come with ink tank capabilities, which DRASTICALLY reduces print costs.

-Robert

Re:Ink

[Physics Dude]

I have a Canon S9000 6-color inkjet and I've refilled the cartridges over and over for about two years with no problems using cheap Sam's Club refill kits. It's the cheapest printer I've used as far as ink costs go.

I've tried to refill HP carts and it was a nightmare! I have either thrown or given away all of my HP inkjet printers. You should have a cron job to print a test page at least once a month though to keep your nozzles in use. For most of my printing I use B&W Laser though... very reliable, full duplex, high res. But when I need a nice 13"x19" photo quality, the Canon's great. ;)

Re:Ink

[Apple Acolyte]

It depends on the inkjet I guess. We got tired of the comparatively poor quality dirty output of our Epson 900 and put it in the garage years ago after it being in service for a number of years. When we needed a backup printer I took it in, cleaned it off, and it printed better than it used to! Contrast that with the Epson MFC we purchased to replace it - yes, another Epson, but it was at a good price. The output was much nicer, but that did not matter when the carts inexplicably froze in place - not even a pair of pliers could get them out. At that point I said no more Epson inkjets. Instead, I went with a Brother 420cn and have been very happy so far. Quality output (text that rivals laser in my opinion), greater color, and it works well with cheap compatible cartridges. I recommend it highly. However, I am also looking to pick up a cheap baby LJ like the 1020 for BW to complement the Brother because I still believe you cannot beat laser for text.

Re:Ink

[Prune]

Best? I've never seen an inkjet or laser come close to the quality of a good thermal dye transfer or wax printer, which, unlike the laser and inkjet, make continuous images rather than little dots.

Re:Ink

[Anonymous Coward]

have you tried a new epson 1800 or 2400. Easily lab quality.

Re:Ink

[dave420]

If you're not going to pick the right paper, of course you're going to have problems :) If you care about what you're printing, you'll use the right paper, and inkjets printing on the right paper is far superior to lasers printing on the right paper.

Re:Ink

[GregPK]

Even with full coverage, Printing with that laser printer is still significantly cheaper than a standard inkjet. Trust me on this one. I used to sell printers for a living. unfortunatly you couldn't get refills though because of your printer using a chip on the toners. But still its definatly cheaper than the next inkjet which for 50 bucks would be lucky to chirp out more than 150 of what you describe. Even with refills nowdays fetching less. high quality refill ink is only cheap if you are using it in a continuous ink system. The only ones that get those are epson printers. Beyond that eh. Stick to the laser you got. If you ever go ink for anything but photos you'll regret it.

Another breakthrough

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Not only is the new ink jet print head 6 times faster they are also 10 times cheaper. Except, of course, they use ink that is 100 times more expensive.

Re:Another breakthrough

[srmalloy]

Excuse me? You should RTFA a little closer:

Silverbrook has forecast printing costs for the 60 page per minute desktop printer at below $0.02 for black text, and under $0.06 for color pages (with 20 percent ink coverage), according to Lyra Research, which had early access to prototypes.

The desktop printer's individual color ink cartridges hold 50ml of ink, an almost unprecedented amount in a consumer product, and will sell for less than $20 each, the company predicts. Most existing inkjet printers from companies like Epson use ink cartridges with a capacity of about 10ml, and prices of $15 to $30.

"Silverbrook expect costs of ink and media supplies will be pushing new lows. They're not looking to subsidize their costs with high ink prices, instead they want more of a balance," says Steve Hoffenberg, Lyra's director of consumer imaging research.

Re:Another breakthrough

[Fishead]

Wow!

Could it be? An inkjet company that figured out why I avoid inkjet printers? Sounds pretty sweet.

Re:Another breakthrough

[imunfair]

The article seemed to say that the ink cartriges are actually cheaper than the current epson/etc ones. Did you not read the article, or do you have some reason to believe it's wrong?

Re:Another breakthrough

[afidel]

Yes, it's called reality. This company can't create ink significantly cheaper than Epson, so once they get their foot in the door it's inevitable that they will try to maximize shareholder value and will jack up ink prices to the same general cost as other market participant.

Re:Another breakthrough

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It might be cheaper to manufacture. But at retail they have a good gig going, giving away the printers and charging an arm and a leg for replacement cartridges. So even if that printer prints using Aquafina it will cost you 100 times to buy the certified ink.

That is what I tried to imply. But with my communications skills being so great, I tried to speak with a tongue in cheek and ended up mangling the tongue. Well, par for the course for me.

Re:Another breakthrough

[CastrTroy]

That's still extremely expensive for such a small amount of in. You're looking at 40 cents per millilitre. Gas is only $1.00 per liter, and that's way more complex a substance than ink. They act like they are doing you a favour, but in reality are still ripping you off.

Re:Another breakthrough

[kestasjk]

A more complex substance? Concrete may be a complex substance but that has nothing to do with the price; it's about abundance, and oil is much more abundant than ink.

Maybe when a lucky Texan strikes black, yellow, cyan, and magenta gold ink prices will plummet, but until then..

Re:Another breakthrough

[moeinvt]

"You're looking at 40 cents per millilitre . . . still ripping you off."

That sounds extremely cynical. Are you suggesting that being "ripped off" by paying $1.50 -> $3.50 perl ml is somehow better, or that people should just stop printing things to avoid getting screwed? You think gasoline is a better deal than ink? Try using it to print a photo(now THAT would be cool).

The whole point is the cost savings vs. competing products, not some philosophical discussion about what the cost of ink should be in an ideal world or the cost of ink vs. that of gas, milk or blood.

Re:Another breakthrough

[Anonymous Coward]

.. and I've got a bridge you may be interested in purchasing

Re:Another breakthrough

[Jahz]

That's still extremely expensive for such a small amount of in. You're looking at 40 cents per millilitre. Gas is only $1.00 per liter, and that's way more complex a substance than ink. They act like they are doing you a favour, but in reality are still ripping you off.

Are you joking?? You can't compare gasoline to printer ink! Why not compare ink to liquid gold? Fool.

Normal ink carts are about the same price for about 25% of the 50ml of ink these new carts have. For example, a random Red HP ink cartridge is $25 for only 17ml http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/C9393AN%2523140

Please explain what calculator you used to determine that $25/17ml is a better deal than $30/50ml... That random HP ink is $1.4 per ml of ink while the Memjet claim is $0.60 per ml all in USD. RTFA

Re:Another breakthrough

[644bd346996]

Is that $0.02 cents per page or $0.02 dollars per page?

Re:Another breakthrough

[balbord]

You really should RTFA.

[quoteTFA]
The desktop printer's individual color ink cartridges hold 50ml of ink, an almost unprecedented amount in a consumer product, and will sell for less than $20 each, the company predicts. Most existing inkjet printers from companies like Epson use ink cartridges with a capacity of about 10ml, and prices of $15 to $30.
[/quoteTFA]

Re:Another breakthrough

[misleb]

New Injet printers... now with 100x the number of nozzles to clog! Sounds like a mixed blessing to me. I think I'll stick with my old HP B&W laserjet, thanks.

-matthew

Re:Another breakthrough

[CastrTroy]

It's a good deal comparatively, but you're still getting ripped off. You'd be completely happy if you went to the grocery store and saw a loaf of bread for $50, just because everyone else is selling them for $100? You're still getting ripped off. I'd rather just not eat bread if that were the case. Just like I'd rather not use inkjet printers because of the high cost.

Re:Another breakthrough

[ColdWetDog]

and oil is much more abundant than ink.

Haven't you heard of ink wells? No? I guess they haven't been popular for a while, but in my day we saw lots more of them than the new fangled oil wells. Smaller and quieter too.

Re:Another breakthrough

[demonbug]

Is that $0.02 cents per page or $0.02 dollars per page? I suppose "dollars" is a little less wrong than putting "cents" after it. You already said it was dollars - that's what the "$" at the beginning of the number is for. Either way you are being redundant.

Re:Another breakthrough

[DragonWriter]

First, the comparison is invalid, even if your complexity claim is true (I actually think modern inks are in some ways "more complex" than gasoline), since you are paying also for the cartridge, not just the ink. But, anyway, it doesn't matter, since ink and gasoline aren't direct substitutes for each other.

About 5 times as much ink for about the same price as current ink would be enough to make inkjet's cost per page competitive with consumer color laser printers, where now, while the printers are far more expensive, toner costs per page are notably less than ink costs per page (even though toner costs per cartridge are far greater, typically).

Re:Another breakthrough

[Headcase88]

Seriously, it sounds like even one clogged nozzle would result in an ugly white line across the height of the page. I mean hopefully they've done their homework and made really good nozzles, or the nozzles are close enough that the surrounding ones can cover up for a broken one, but that's a serious issue to address.

(I did not RTFA)

Re:Another breakthrough

[644bd346996]

It's funny. Laugh. But look up "verizon math" first.

Re:Another breakthrough

[treeves]

It's pretty expensive, but comparison to gasoline is silly. How about compared to ArF photoresist? (such as used to make 65nm and 45nm node chips) It can be over $2/mL, and it's mostly solvent too.

Thanks a lot!

[Carrion Creeper]

Why did you have to go reminding everyone of the law of supply and demand!? Now the first home/office printer will cost $600.

sheesh

Sweet

[darjen]

Now we can kill trees even faster than ever before!

Re:Sweet

[Silver Sloth]

Ironically the paper industry isn't neccessarily the tree killer it's often made out to be. For a significant chunk of the world, for example the north of Scotland, the only realistic crop to grow is timber, and, that nealy always means timber for the paper industry.

Anyway, I'm sure the trees have a good life and are killed in a humane way, not like the battery trees we used to have.

Re:Sweet

[Smidge204]

Trees are farmed, as opposed to cutting natural forests (although that still occurs, it's usually part of the process of expanding tree farming) That means trees are replanted. Moreover, they are usually replanted faster than they are cut down because they take years to grow, and they need to be prepared for future demand.

The net result is that North America is actually getting greener. 0.12% annually through the 90s and 0.05% annually since 2000.
=Smidge=

Re:Sweet

[linguizic]

The net result is that North America is actually getting greener. 0.12% annually through the 90s and 0.05% annually since 2000.

This may be true, but it's also getting less diverse. Not to mention the destruction of a habitat every time a crop is harvested. Take the state that I'm currently in, Mississippi. It's a very green state, very heavily forested, but with fast growing pines because of timber is the number one industry here. It's very rare to see hardwoods or old-growth in this state. What the lumber industry is doing here is stunting the growth of mature ecosystems. I'm not saying we need to stop harvesting lumber, only that there are other dimensions we need to think about and plan around.

Re:Sweet

[qw0ntum]

Problem with tree farms is that most of them are wonderfully homogeneous. Having a monoculture forest planted in rows for easy retrieval of wood is nice, but it can't fill the ecological role of a natural forest. More trees is nice I guess but 1) not all trees are the same and 2) natural wilderness areas contain more than trees which is crucial to maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

Re:Sweet

[Grishnakh]

Lots of homogeneous trees is good for reducing air pollution and atmospheric carbon dioxide, but that's about it.

Old-growth forest is needed for natural ecosystems (in addition to the prior factors). Having huge tree farms for timber/paper is fine with me, as long as plenty of old-growth forests are left to be wild.

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen to live near a paper mill and the interesting thing about it is that they don't cut down any "real" trees to keep the thing running. Poplar trees are planted in fields on a rotation basis where they grow for two or three years and are then harvested. After a crop of poplars has been harvested, they plant other crops in those same fields for a couple of years and then go back to the trees.

Videos real?

[jacksonic]

The videos are nice looking, but we never see blank paper sucked out of a paper tray. For all we know, those are mock-ups spitting out pre-printed pages.

If, on the other hand, they are real, then it's impressive how unreal the technology looks!

Re:Videos real?

[TommyBear]

RTFA. The technology is not novel. The price tag is. The tech already exists if you have $20,000 to spare.

Re:Videos real?

[La Gris]

If you account the bandwidth required to feed all that graphic data between a computer and the print device and the power required to process all that data from a print dialect to colored dots and driving the internal printer mechanics, it makes me very skeptical.

Re:Videos real?

[jacksonic]

FA R'd quite well, thank you.

I don't doubt the technology exists, I'm merely pointing out that the demo was set up in a fake-looking way. They should have shown the printer actually printing, not just magically spitting out pages. A research company pushing a technology like this when they have no plans to produce it themselves is always suspect, and their method of demonstration does nothing to alleviate that suspicion.

Re:Videos real?

[GeckoX]

Are you serious? That is by far the biggest non-issue going with printers. That problem was solved a LONG time ago.

Printers print at MANY orders of magnitude slower than the data being printed can be transferred, manipulated, organized and sent to the print head. This is simply not a problem. The bottleneck on any printer is actual print speed, NOT data availability.

Re:Videos real?

[Xugumad]

...unless doing something crazy. Like the time I wrote a 3D renderer in PostScript. Still, essentially you're right; adding more processing power to printers is relatively trivial, print speed has been a far greater challenge...

Re:Videos real?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

This wasn't even a problem back when I had my daisy wheel printer hooked up through a 300bps serial link

Re:Videos real?

[AvitarX]

Is that really true?

I work at a commercial printer. Are equipment is not the newest, but pages are definetly NOT transferred, manipulated, and organized at 60 pages/minute (speed of our fastest color printer). In fact I could design a file that would take orders of magnitude longer than that.

I doubt that this is a winprinter as the grad parent seams to think it is. What the grandparent doesn't realize is that the first set of something will take much longer than 1 second/page but then it will start kicking them out.

Re:Videos real?

[zaaj]

I've seen another company's single-pass industrial inkjet systems pumping out images at comparable speeds, but to get that performance in such small devices is quite impressive.

As for the bandwidth question:

lets see, 70,400 jets but they have different size printers, so we'll go with the document printer's specs:, 1600 dpi and a page per second give you 11 inches per second minimum, for a full coverage (US letter size) print, that would be:
  8.5 * 1600 = 13,600 jets on the document printer
  1600 * 11 = 17,600 firings per second, for a bandwidth of
13,600 * 17,600 = 239,360,000, or about 2.4 Mbps, so that's doable.

The large format printer would be another matter, but the dpi might well be much lower (billboard-size pictures don't often face "close" scrutiny) If it's not, then:

  51 * 1600 = 81,600 jets wide, so we'll probably assume the 70,400 is the wide-format printhead?

In that case, at 70,400 / 51" = 1380 dpi. If we assume the same resolution in the paper-movement direction, we'd get

    1,380 * 12 = 16,560 firings per second, for a bandwidth of

  70,400 * 16,560 = 1,165,824,000, or ~ 1.2 Gbps - still not impossible, with, say, 10-GigE, but nothing to sneeze at, and not solved all that long ago...

Re:Videos real?

[trentblase]

Math is slightly off, plus you forgot the colors. 239,360,000 dots per page at 2-3 bits per dot (4-6 possible inks - assuming no variable dot size) and 1 page per second is 457-686 Mbps. This pushes the limits of USB 2, but assumes image processing is done up front. If image processing is done on the printer, then PC link speed is probably not a problem.

Re:Videos real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that really true?

No, it's not. I work in the IT dept at a commercial printer/mailer as well and we have Kodak Versamarks that require entire racks of servers to feed them data. Our printers are not measured in pages per minute (60ppm? that's hardly better than a desktop) but feet per minute from wide rolls. I'm not sure of the exact speed but it's a few hundred feet per minute at least.

Re:Videos real?

[chebucto]

Not so. Transfer & processing of data takes a non-trivial amount of time. You can prove this by doing the following:

1. Take all the paper out of your printer;
2. Print a ~20 page/2mb PDF;
3. Wait a few minutes;
4. Put the paper back in the printer.

In this case, the pages will immediately come out as fast as the printer can print them. If, on the other hand, you just send the print job as per normal, there will be a delay before the first page comes out, and a subsequent delay between each page. At least, that's how it is with my CLJ 2600n (which, admittedly, has crappy internal hw specs).

Re:Videos real?

[printman]

Um, no, interface bandwidth is a serious issue on many printers, and will almost certainly be an issue for this printer as well - consider that a full-bleed A4 page has about 139 million addressable dots at 1200 DPI (which sounds like what this printer will provide). For 1-bit printer data with the typical packbits (RLE) compression, you'll need to push 8.2MB of data per page per color on average for photos. For a 60ppm printer, that translates into a required bandwidth of 8.2MB per second for grayscale output and 24-32MB/sec for color output!

Now, while the USB spec does support devices up to 480Mbits/sec, I've never seen a printer come close to supporting that speed - this printer would need to support approximately half the maximum USB bandwidth to provide 60ppm printing. Even the high-end Epson LFP printers can't pull that many bits over USB, which is why you need to use Firewire or the latest network cards to keep them printing...

Anyways, I'm more inclined to take that 60ppm figure with a large dose of salt, and figure that, like most other manufacturers, they mean 60ppm printing plain black text with no graphics/images. The engine may be capable of high speed, but the interface will be the bottleneck for getting data to the printer.

Re:Videos real?

[Anonymous Coward]

"(billboard-size pictures don't often face "close" scrutiny)"

48"x36" is a pretty typical blueprint size around here, I've seen drawings up to 72"x42". They get pretty close scutiny, with 600dpi being about the minumum.

However, the previous comment about rasterization not being the bottleneck is totally wrong. Our (black and white) plotter can spit out several 36"x48" drawings a minute, but it takes a couple of minutes per drawing to render them before they get sent to the plotter, and the plot server takes some time to digest them as well before it starts plotting them.

Re:Videos real?

[modecx]

I dunno, I used to work with a 3M Scotchprint 2000 electrostatic machine, it would do 2000 feet of 54" material at 400 DPI an hour, which if IIRC, was about 33 feet per minute. The ripped images were separated into their individual colors, and each color was stored on a separate 10,000 RPM SCSI drive, and each were streamed into the printer. It kept up with the printer, but I tell you, there wasn't that much overhead... But that was a while ago, and the electronics have come a long way.

If they have this linear array of nozzles shooting out 1 foot per second, there is one reason I don't see this working, and it's not the need for a highly specialized workflow:

It's all about absorption and drying of inks. Most medias will absorb inks fairly slowly. I also worked with a 52" HP 5000 inkjet printer. It was entirely possible to print so fast (with our slow-ass printer) to not allow our inks to, first of all, get into the coating on our media, and secondly, to dry enough so that the next passes didn't oversaturate the coating. We had to set our rip to build in a delay between head passes when we were doing jobs with full saturation, otherwise things looked like crap because the inks blended together.

For this reason alone, I think this technology is most likely horse-hockey. Unless huge advances are made in coatings, the technology, even if it were capable of these speeds, will be useless.

Re:Videos real?

[zaaj]

See, that's where I'm not sure what they mean by "dots per inch", and how it might relate to pixels per inch (a pixel having more than the 4 - 6 ink colors) - I liked the last calculation best, because I was basing it on the number of jets in the printhead - they didn't say 70,400 jets per color, just a total of 70,400 jets, so unless they're using Versajet(tm) or something similar to specify multiple drop sizes, it would only be one bit per jet per firepulse.

Re:Videos real?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a $300 printer, that's pretty impressive.

Re:Videos real?

[trentblase]

Good point, but it's clear that 70400 jets referred to an 8-inch wide print head on the A4 paper. Oddly, the photo shows a 10-deep nozzles, implying the 5 ink cartidges needed each do 2 passes over slightly shifted spots. This is odd because (70400 / 8) / 5 = 1760 dpi, but I digress. Basing bandwidth on these 70400 nozzles, each of which can print only 1 color, and 1600 * 11.69 = 18704 vertical firings per nozzle, bandwidth is 70400 * 18704 = 1316761600, approximately the 1.2 Gbps number you came up with... but this is for the A4 printer. The wide-format would be even more, assuming the same resolution. But there's no way your average home computer could handle this -- article says printer is meant for the home, so they must do processing on-board. Which means a beefy processing element and lots of memory, or exaggerated print speeds. At the $300 max they intend to sell it at, something here has to give. I can believe incredible text printing speeds, for instance, but not the high-resolution color images shown in the video. Especially since the ink has to dry before you plop another piece of paper on top 1 second later. If you've ever printed a fully saturated inkjet image, you know what I'm talking about.

Re:Videos real?

[zaaj]

Using slight offsets with multiple jetting modules is perfectly understandable - it's hard to make the jets physically close enough to get the resolutions desired. Getting them too close makes it hard to make the walls between ink paths stiff enough to prevent mechanical cross-talk - the drop ejecting pressure wave in one ink path could bow the wall enough to cause a pressure wave in adjacent ink paths.

The two ways I know of to increase effective resolutions, one is to use multiple jetting modules offset from one another, as in this case. Another is to use a saber angle - position the print head at an angle other than perpendicular to the motion of the medium (paper), such as \ or / instead of |. This does mean the jets have to fire with a time offset to make a a line perpendicular to the paper path, and it reduces the total width, so it's probably better for single-head narrow printing swath applications, like the label printer in the video. I know of assembly-line print-on-cardboard barcode printers that use a saber angle as well.

Deja vu?

[Short Circuit]

I could swear I've heard this approach mentioned before. Is anyone else getting a sense of deja vu?

Re:Deja vu?

[Notquitecajun]

I could swear I've heard this approach mentioned before. Is anyone else getting a sense of deja vu?

Re:Deja vu?

[fitten]

Heh, yeah... band printers and such from the dot-matrix days of yore.

I could swear I've heard this approach mentioned before. Is anyone else getting a sense of deja vu?

Re:Deja vu?

[reyalpdemannu]

Yes, I thought somebody had retrofitted a LJ 2100 or something to do the same thing many years ago. The print head was 8.5 inches wide and the nozzles were in bands oriented diagonally. The printer shot out paper just as fast as the rollers could feed it. They had the head connected to external ink tanks, IIRC.

Re:Deja vu?

[CastrTroy]

Won't this mean the ink is even wetter, and more likely to smudge than with regular slow inkjet printers. At least with slow printers the ink has some time to dry before it gets outside the printer.

Re:Deja vu?

[AliasMarlowe]

...like a line printer from days of yore (old fogey alert: yore = IBM 360 era). Line printers using a spinning drum and array of hammers could bash out several pages per second. The faster the drum was spinning over the array of hammers, the faster it could print. Ear protection was advisable in the vicinity, and paper jams could be spectacular. Mind you, graphics were limited to ASCII art (or more accurately, EBCDIC art).

Re:Deja vu?

[Futurepower(R)]

Yes, on Reddit and Digg.

Re:Deja vu?

[Short Circuit]

and paper jams could be spectacular. That's something I would have liked to see...

Re:Deja vu?

[trentblase]

Hence the error "printer on fire" http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=102893054014512 &w=2

Re:Deja vu?

[Buzz_Litebeer]

There was an article on slashdot about the fact that many people were expecting them to release new printer technology based on some patents that they had approved. this is the first time they have released an actual example.

Re:Deja vu?

[HawkinsD]

The line printers were awesome machines. Paper moved through them like water through a firehose (at least, that's how it seemed to me at the time). The paper moved even faster when skipping over the blank spaces on the paper (at the perforations), or when you pressed the "SPEW" button.

They also had little dangly chains that touched the papera it was fed, to dissipate the static electric charge that built up from moving all that paper so quickly.

Even a small one was always housed inside a massive enclosure with egg-crate foam covering the inside, as sound insulation. Sealing them up, though, made 'em run nice and hot.

Beastly.

Re:Deja vu?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. I believe HP announced this about a year ago. Used two 4.5" wide heads offset next to each other. I had wondered why not just make one WIDE head, at the time. Guess these guys had the same thought.

Dead nozzles ?

[Rastignac]

Too many nozzles ! Many nozzles = many chances something goes wrong.
One dead (or dirty) nozzle, and your document has a "vertical white line" all the way long. Awfull.
Many dead (or dirty) nozzles, and you must change the whole (and costy ?) printer head.

(When the head gets dirty, the "clean head" function will eat so much ink that nobody wants to use it !).

Re:Dead nozzles ?

[Cowclops]

Well, one vertical white line is still better than having 30 horizontal white lines like with any other inkjet ever made.

Never mind that if the nozzle array is more than one deep (Or maybe 4 deep, for CMYK) then you still won't see a big vertical line.

Re:Dead nozzles ?

[dollar99]

Current "back-and-forth" printers overlap themselves to hide bad nozzles. Most make about 8 passes over the image, putting down 1/8th of the ink each time. This is essentially a 1 pass printer which makes me wonder what they're going to do about bad nozzles.

Re:Dead nozzles ?

[d3ac0n]

RTFA dude,

They show an image of the print head a bit further down the page. There are THOUSANDS of nozzles, in very deep rows, set into 1 inch square sections. So even if you got all those nozzles clogged enough to create a white line, you would just replace that little section and done.

The guys that made this are very smart. I'm sure they thought the whole "clogging" problem through.

Re:Dead nozzles ?

[davper]

This is how the manaufacturer will make it's money. ten times the price for a cartridge that only holds 6 times the ink.

Re:Dead nozzles ?

[sarahbau]

If there are 70,400 nozzles, and 1600 nozzles per inch in a line 8" wide, there must be 5 or 6 rows of them. The article shows a picture of the nozzles arranged in multiple rows.

70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[dereference]

I just wonder how prone this will be to clogs, and how expensive it will be to replace when (not if) it inevitably occurs. I'm sure that's not how "disruptive" was meant this context, but that's all I can imagine.

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[fishthegeek]

Well, I can't speculate on clogging, but you can be certain that repairs will be more than the cost of the machine itself.... this printer, at that price is disposable not repairable.

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Also, speed is far from my first complaint. Inkjets have not been good for me in terms of paper handling, reliability or cost of use.

I'd say that my inkjets have more than 10x the paper jamming incidents as my lasers, despite my lasers being used more, and one laser is a duplex printer, which is another avenue for paper jamming, but it rarely happens on them.

Another complaint of mine is the cost of the ink. I think my lasers get over 10x more pages per dollar than inkjets.

As such, I'd much rather buy a laser printer, even if the print quality is a little lower. For the occasional photo and certain types of product mock-ups, I haul out my inkjet from storage, and only for that occasion.

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[dereference]

I'd say that my inkjets have more than 10x the paper jamming incidents as my lasers, despite my lasers being used more Actually, I wouldn't say "despite" there, I would say "because" instead.

I've noticed that the lack of use--not heavy use--is precisely what causes the most problems with ink jets (and perhaps all printers, although to a much lesser extent). Ink clogs seem to tend to form whenever ink is not routinely flowing through the nozzles. Even the ink jet printers that (annoyingly so) perform self-cleaning cycles every day seem somewhat less prone to clogs than those that don't. The biggest factor by far in my experience is how often the ink jets are exercised.

Manufacturers often include a specification for maximum prints per month, but I think there's really a latent minimum you have to achieve before you'll get anything approaching a long life out of the printer. Like you, the only printers I've ever seen "wear out" due to heavy use were laser printers; ink jets are typically replaced (often due to clogs) long before that ever happens.

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[Hoi Polloi]

Printer manufacturers should rename them "ink consuming devices", or maybe "cash extractors". My next printer will be a laser printer.

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[moeinvt]

How do all of these "It's going to clog" comments keep getting modded "Insightful"? Duh!

Now, there's always a reason for skepticism when it comes to press releases in the tech industry. To suggest that the engineers who designed an inkjet printer didn't think of "clogging" as a major potential issue is ludicrous. I don't have several years and a pile of venture capital to figure it out, but I'm sure that they've engineered around this. Do you think their business plan is to hype a fancy new printer technology and sell a few thousand printers before everyone knows that the things are just going to clog up?

You software geeks just aren't giving the hardware geeks the benefit of the doubt.

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[dereference]

Do you think their business plan is to hype a fancy new printer technology and sell a few thousand printers before everyone knows that the things are just going to clog up? No, of course not. I think their business plan is to sell a few million printers--despite the fact that many folks will have predicted the clogs--and then to make even more by having a hand in the service contracts to repair and replace the clogged nozzles. That's exactly what the current ink jet manufacturers are doing, so I'm not sure why you'd expect this to be any different. It's called planned obsolescence.

You software geeks just aren't giving the hardware geeks the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure these things aren't totally worthless, and for a certain segment of the market they will be perfect. As noted in another reply above, if you use these printers above some undisclosed minimum amount of prints per day, I'm sure they'll be quite reliable. Perhaps more so than traditional moving-head ink jets.

To suggest that the engineers who designed an inkjet printer didn't think of "clogging" as a major potential issue is ludicrous. If you would take the time to re-read my posting, I'm sure you'll see I never even remotely suggested this. This printer clearly isn't targeted to people like me, and I'm fine with that; I wish them luck in their venture. Clearly nozzle design was a significant part of their design; the thing claims to be 1600dpi after all.

How do all of these "It's going to clog" comments keep getting modded "Insightful"? Duh! I'm not sure whether it's any more or less "insightful" than any other postings, but nobody (at the time I originally submitted the posting you're berating) had mentioned it yet. In fact, I'm really most curious whether the (well-known) problem of clogging will somehow scale better than expected for the massive increase in the number of nozzles, and if they have, how exactly they've managed it. If there were a "+1 Good Question" I'm guessing that would be more appropriate. For you, I suspect Offtopic for complaining about mods would be in order (or perhaps Troll, for making baseless accusations of ignorance).

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[moeinvt]

"If you would take the time to re-read my posting . . ."

It was not my intent to single you out, which is why I said "these posts". I also wasn't reading them in any particular order. I just selected a particular post for a reply to issue a collective retort to the general tone of the discussion.

Re this vs. other printers: "I'm not sure why you'd expect this to be any different."

It looks like Silverbrook's business plan is to sell/license "the technology" (software, print heads and control chips) to other companies. I don't even see that they're interested in selling ink, much less service contracts. Therefore it makes no sense to me that they would come to market with an inferior technology. Who would license it if there wasn't a compelling value proposition?

Some sort of disruptive technology in printing is long overdue. I think this looks very interesting, and possibly revolutionary. Perhaps my optimism is unwarranted, but I was rolling my eyes every time I read a post suggesting that this new technology would have more problems than the technology currently on the market.

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[dereference]

I just selected a particular post for a reply to issue a collective retort to the general tone of the discussion. Fair enough.

It looks like Silverbrook's business plan is to sell/license "the technology" Agreed.

Therefore it makes no sense to me that they would come to market with an inferior technology. Who would license it if there wasn't a compelling value proposition? Allow me to explain. The concept of "inferior" is subject to your viewpoint. Assuming these things are sufficiently reliable, such that they're not dismissed immediately as lemons, the fact that they clog, waste ink with endless cleaning cycles, require expensive routine maintenance, and so forth will all be seen as great attributes when they are selling this to their customers. Their customers, keep in mind, are those companies would license their technology, not the end-users. This is a decidedly different perspective, I'm sure you'll agree, than that of the end-users, yet it certainly does make a compelling business case. Clogged nozzles are simply a well-considered part of the business equation.

Some sort of disruptive technology in printing is long overdue. I think this looks very interesting, and possibly revolutionary. Perhaps my optimism is unwarranted, but I was rolling my eyes every time I read a post suggesting that this new technology would have more problems than the technology currently on the market. Quite honestly, if they had projected a significantly higher price I might have agreed with you. They could have taken the angle of high-reliability due to no moving (ink-related) parts and perhaps described how the total cost of ownership would be lower due to solving the nozzle clogging issues that plague the current generation of ink jets. However, they seem to have gone the bargain basement route, and while I'm guessing the technology is better overall than current state of the art, I simply can't see how it won't have at least the same level of problems we have now with nozzles clogging, if not vastly worse. I'd like to share your optimism, but when I encounter a print technology inventor touting several orders of magnitude more of the single most unreliable part of current printers, with hardly any mention of the clogging issue, my realism kicks in and I start to roll my eyes with the realization that this is, at best, more of the same.

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[hurfy]

"To suggest that the engineers who designed an inkjet printer didn't think of "clogging" as a major potential issue is ludicrous."

This would be a lot more convincing arguement if i didn't have 2 clogged epsons (which i actually liked) in the garage.......

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[moeinvt]

OK, if you're still reading, and have access to US Patents, check out: US6857726 (Kia Silverbrook)

"This invention concerns a printhead capping mechanism for preventing evaporation of ink from a printhead when it is not in use"

The thing is 69 pages long, and from a cursory inspection, it seems like this is among the 1% of patents that actually describe something novel.

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[dereference]

check out: US6857726 (Kia Silverbrook) [...] it seems like this is among the 1% of patents that actually describe something novel. Novel, perhaps, but not necessarily any more effective. Note that the whole point of this invention seems to deal with the fact that the print head assembly doesn't move in their innovative printer. In traditional ink jet printers, the entire print head routinely moves to a parked location, where the nozzles are either plugged or evacuated, with sponges to absorb the excess ink. Their novel approach is a system whereby the print head is fixed, and so these caps and sponges need to be movable to engage/disengage with the nozzles. That's exactly what this invention describes, if you read the claims (the section that can actually be enforced).

In fact, nothing at all suggests that this is any more effective or efficient at preventing ink evaporation than the current state of the art, and I'm not even sure I understand the point you're trying to make by citing it in the first place. Sure, these inventors considered clogging as an issue, and probably put significant thought and resources into designing a solution; I never said otherwise. However, that in no way implies that they've somehow managed to make nozzle clogs a thing of the past. In truth, it's more clear from this patent you noted that they've simply adapted current technologies to fit their novel (fixed) page-width print heads.

Re:70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I really wasn't considering nozzles. I had enough use to keep them going, but inkjet paper handling has been a problem for me, no matter what the print volume was. Fresher paper might help, but paper freshness has never been a problem for my lasers.

What you say!!!

[Rob T Firefly]

I tried to get a Memjet, but accidentally bought Memejet instead. Now all I get are pictures from "All Your Base," "Yatta!," "Real Ultimate Power," and that guy in the homemade Tron costume.

Re:What you say!!!

[pipatron]

But what happened when you pushed the button? Did you receive something special? Bacon?

Re:What you say!!!

[MyHair]

I tried to get a Memjet, but accidentally bought Memejet instead. Now all I get are pictures from "All Your Base," "Yatta!," "Real Ultimate Power," and that guy in the homemade Tron costume.

O RLY?

Re:What you say!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone has to say it:

I for one welcome our new Memejet overlords!

Re:What you say!!!

[Jay Maynard]

Considering what I'm paying for 8x10 color pictures, this might be a big win for me.

quality

[DoofusOfDeath]

So no more banding?

Re:quality

[John Hansen]

Instead of the typical banding (caused by a. nozzles missing as the printhead travels side-to-side, or b. improper paper feed motion settings) you will get more of a "striping" effect caused as nozzles fail while the paper is in motion.

This will look somewhat like the white stripes you get on a laser printer when the toner begins to run out.

Banding caused by paper movement may still be an issue, but it doesn't show up very much in desktop machines as desktop media is almost all fairly uniform in thickness. However, it will be an issue on wide-format machines (such as the 51" monster they've announced), as different materials have widely varying thicknesses. For example, a 13oz vinyl banner material can be up to four times thicker than a glossy photo paper.

Additionally, I don't believe this kind of head technology will be well-suited to wide-format outdoor printing (the industry I work in as a service tech). This is because the outdoor printers use alcohol and solvent inks to improve adhesion and UV resistance, and as a side-effect of their more rapid drying times they are especially prone to head clogs if the piezo jets are left exposed to air.

This is a wise move, from one with experience.

[dada21]

I own and run VIPMinistry.com, a church print co-operative. We used color laser printers for the first few months and they were slow and painful to watch. Then we discovered Xerox's Phaser LED printers -- basically a laser, but with a "full width" of LEDs spanning the width of the page. Now they crank out double-sided sheets about 6 times faster than single-sided sheets (full color). With just 4 of these printers, we have replaced 12 lasers, and likely could replace 24 of them. They're mega-fast.

Inkjet printers are still my favorite if not for the high cost of ink and the inability to work with a wide variety of paper. LEDs/Lasers are very maintenance heavy (drums, toner, a billion rollers, LED/Lasers over time, waste cartridges, etc, etc). I love the idea of a full-width printhead, though.

The biggest problem with inkjets is ink technology. I'd love to find a solvent-based printer or something closer to an Indigo. Instead of working on faster printers (which help business more than the home), I think they should be working on newer printhead+ink technology.

Re:This is a wise move, from one with experience.

[josecanuc]

At my office we got an HP CLJ 5500, which is normal color laser. Except the 4 toner carts are "in-line" and the paper makes only one pass through the system. It gets 24ppm in both color and black-only modes.

Unfortunately, HP discontinued it quite quickly and the machine does have a couple of quirks. But in general it has been a great printer.

Re:This is a wise move, from one with experience.

[suffe]

You own a co-operative? Wow. Is that like "sharing with yourself"?

I for one...

[McNihil]

do not believe our new printing overlords!

How do we know...?

[raddan]

... that the printer isn't dumping out pre-printed pages?

Long AND Wide

[Doc Ruby]

How about a print array head of maybe a few dozen of these "full width" heads stacked up to print whole bands at once? Eventually a full "sheet at once" printer.

Then they can get really fancy, micropositioning the "print face" at subdot distances for even higher resolution...

Meanwhile, I'd like to use the printface with a video sensor for registration against the "last pass" for grafitti. Color, hi-res grafitti. Bombing by remote-control micro-helicopter...

The inevitable future of all new media

[Denial93]

So, since everyone is going to watch their pr0n videos on paper now, where are they going to store finished prints? Use them as wallpaper tiles? Or, since the sheets are connected, do semi-tasteful pranks involving rolls of the stuff and hundred-storey buildings?

Re:The inevitable future of all new media

[BlueTrin]

I am waiting for YouMemJetTube.com to be sued by the MJPAA ...

Fast, but how efficient?

[IndustrialComplex]

I'm a bit curious to know how they plan to keep the efficiency of this printer up. Now, I'm not an expert (Heck, barely familiar) on the ink used in inkjets, but wouldn't there be some issue with the length of the path the ink has to take from the reservoir to the print heads?

I'm sure there are ways around it, but I just can't see why I would want to use an inkjet where I previously used a laser (bulk office printing). The fear of the cartridge cost is enough to make me very wary of this tech.

Re:Fast, but how efficient?

[dave420]

If you'd read the article, you wouldn't have posted those concerns.

Re:Fast, but how efficient?

[IndustrialComplex]

I read the article, and I reread the article after your comment. I will however concede that I did not watch the video because I was at work. Are you referring to their claim of how small the ink droplets are so it can dry fast? There was also mention that it holds a lot of ink compared to normal inkjets. A large reservoir would of course be necessary, but just because it holds more ink, doesn't mean my concerns are invalid. What if I don't print for a day or two? Do I risk drying up or clogging the channel between that reservoir and the nozzles?

The ink is cheap, according to the article, but until it actually comes to market, I really can't be sure of that claim. Trust me, I would love for this technology to succeed. But like most of us here, I've not had the most favorable opinion of inkjets for efficiency. I may just be jaded from too much gouging from the current inkjet leaders.

It's a glorified press release with a video

[jimicus]

Am I the only one who thinks this reads like advert in an attempt to get more capital?

Every other sentence was "Analysts think...". Which can be loosely translated into English as "At a wild guess, we reckon...."

They don't give a concrete release date for the product or any price more detailed than "less than $300". There's no point in producing this piece right now for the benefit of potential customers because all a potential customer can do is gawp at the video. They can't buy the product, they can't even see it for themselves at a local computer store. Similarly, seeing as there's obviously an intent to commercialise the product, there's no sense in this piece existing purely for the benefit of researchers (and besides, it hardly looks like a research paper).

I think someone's venture capital is running out.

Re:It's a glorified press release with a video

[solevita]

Am I the only one who thinks this reads like advert in an attempt to get more capital?

What else have you come to expect from Slashdot?

Re:It's a glorified press release with a video

[BlueTrin]

Can't you guess ?!? Stuff for nerd that matters like:

• - Having no sex in MMO D&D for 100 Millions years

• - Linux/MacOS rules

• - Vista has security issues

That's the only reason I read Slashdot ! :)

Re:It's a glorified press release with a video

[DingerX]

Nah, it's just the same writing staff as for Leonard Nimoy in in search of: "Scholars think..."

Compartmentalize

[everphilski]

... then compartmentalize the print heads into, say, half-inch spans. When the streaks start coming, replace the appropriate head. I'm sure they have thought this through...

Re:Compartmentalize

[GundamFan]

It could be that the ink cartridge is incorporated into the "head array"... at least that is how I would do it.

at the very least ti would have to be user replaceable for this to work.

Re:Compartmentalize

[moeinvt]

"I'm sure they have thought this through..."

Indeed. I'm sure they've thought through 99.9% of the problems the experts on this board are suggesting. The company is just NOT going to develop and announce a new product/technology without massive amounts of testing and de-bugging, and they're sure as hell not going to just forget about all of the KNOWN problems with current ink-jet products.

This isn't a piece of software folks.

Re:Compartmentalize

[shawn(at)fsu]

Right now some engineer is breaking out in a cold sweat thinking "Sh!t... Did we think about that?"

Seriously though I agree with you; I'm sure they think about stuff like this, it's not like printers are a new invention, they have been around long enough where people that design them know what potential problems need to be accounted for.

Re:Compartmentalize

[DragonWriter]

I'm sure they've thought through 99.9% of the problems the experts on this board are suggesting.

I'm sure they have. And I'm sure they've decided to not deal with 75% of them because doing so would increase cost, but failing to do so won't affect sales all that much until there is a competitor that uses the same technique but addresses them better, and they are quite willing to address them one at a time until then in "new, improved" models.

go laser

[Anonymous Coward]

it's cheaper and it's fast today.

Whats old

[afidel]

is new again. Laser printers went through this. The original laser printers were raster based laser based units, but they quickly went to arrays of LED lasers because a bunch of silicone was cheaper than the stuff needed to steer the laser accurately. My problem with a super faster inkjet is that a bad print job would cost an absolute fortune, it's bad enough when a fast laser cranks out a couple hundred pages of ASCII goop, thats about 5 cents per page, when you do the same with an inkjet it's probably more like 30 cents per page.

Re:Whats old

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

Not if you have a HP that doesn't understand PCL. Our Laser can dump 100% black pages at 20ppm. About 20p a page or £4/min.

Re:Whats old

[LynnwoodRooster]

because a bunch of silicone was cheaper than the stuff needed

See, that's what they WANT you to think. But the bunches of silicone get them noticed, and pretty soon, there's a $25,000 court case, and they're gone along with half your salary for the next umpteen years...

Re:Whats old

[imsabbel]

Sorry, you dont have a clue.

90% of all modern lasers are still rastering with lasers. Thats why they are called "laser" printers.
There are a few manufactorers of LED printers (Not "LED-Lasers", thats like saying "a gasoline diesel engine"). Oki comes to mind, as they are solely doing led prints.

And the difference there isnt really compareable, as both techniques dont feature any lateral movement on the paper... its done via rotating mirrors and a refocus lens.

Re:Whats old

[Anonymous Coward]

Silicone is not the same thing as silicon.

Re:Whats old

[dave420]

If you read the article, you'd know this printer is cheaper than laser printers currently out there, and far cheaper than other inkjets.

printing press?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Take THAT, Gutenberg!

You Killed Texyt!

[Anonymous Coward]

So you should go to the Memjet site.

Erm... slashdotted?

[kazade84]

The link was working fine a minute ago.... now it just doesn't exist?

Re:Erm... slashdotted?

[Texyt]

You damn kids and your modems... you fried our server... We couldn't even get in ourselves to increase the cache time for a while. Seems to be okay now. I think And thank you for visiting

Brother piezo electric printer 2005

[Anonymous Coward]

Well erm, Brother has a piezo electric row printer that can spit out 170 pages a minute that sounds familiar. Also using the row-at-a-time-like-a-fax-machine trick

http://www.redferret.net/?p=5291

drying time?

[butterflysrage]

ok, if it's spitting photos out at that speed, how many of them will be ruined because the ink wasnt dry before the second page landed on top?

Re:drying time?

[mcguyver]

RTFA...it clearly says tiny drops of ink are used allowing it to dry instantly.

3D Printing

[WED Fan]

I'd love to see this move to the 3D (Z Corp) printers for a very fast print cycle.

I also like this technology over color laserjet printers for FPO (first page out) speed. Cost will have to be another factor, hopefully it will be much cheaper than laser color toner.

Flacs

[JackSpratts]

company flacs crank out panting press release salted with superlatives. company trolls flog site to maintain momentum. all "backed up by" a shiny video proving what exactly? here's an idea to future disruptors: skip all the breathless prose and just let the amazing randi have at it. when he says it's legit the world will beat down your door. - js.

Bring out your dead

[BillGatesLoveChild]

The Inkjet is well and truly dead. Overpriced Ink did it. The public have gone over to cheap color laser printers and they're not coming back. G A M E O V E R.

My trusty Canon LBP5200 Color Laser Printer is just fine and dandy thank you. I would have looked at the HP, but I couldn't work out if their Laserjets were Laser printers or Ink jets. That has to be the dumbest product name HP ever came up with.

Re:Bring out your dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Captain Obvious. Did the word "Laser" in "LaserJet" not give away the technology used therein? :)

Re:Bring out your dead

[Hal_Porter]

Can Lasers really print photos as effectively as a inkjet though? All the lasers I've seen manage text and line art fine, but color photos look bad even on a brand new printer. And the quality drops throughout the printer life - printing halftone color on the office color laser looks like something out of the 1980's.

Re:Bring out your dead

[MyHair]

Inkjets are better than laser for photos, but on the other hand how often do you closely inspect a photo after buying the printer? And if you do, there are photo printer services that can outdo your inkjet. I've found my color laser to be fine for snapshots and even some framed stuff, because I don't put my nose to the photo when looking at it.

Also, I expect the toner will outlast the ink (as in color fading), but I haven't really checked into that.

In response to the gp poster, last I checked LaserJets were laser and OfficeJets, DeskJets and DesignJets were ink. And JetDirect is their line of internal and external print servers.

Re:Bring out your dead

[ivan256]

Really, who cares? If you need higher quality than a color laser, you can run down to the local pharmacy and get a digital print that will be higher quality than what you inkjet would have printed for less than the cost of the ink and paper if you had done it at home.

The only think inkjets are still good for are printing on CDs.

Re:Bring out your dead

[zakezuke]

Inkjets are better than laser for photos, but on the other hand how often do you closely inspect a photo after buying the printer? And if you do, there are photo printer services that can outdo your inkjet. I've found my color laser to be fine for snapshots and even some framed stuff, because I don't put my nose to the photo when looking at it.

There are photoservices which will outdo an inkjet, but they are actually few and far between. Inkjet on the right paper does a superb job.

Also, I expect the toner will outlast the ink (as in color fading), but I haven't really checked into that.

I lack data my self. http://www.wilhelm-research.com/ doesn't seem to address color lasers. Epsons Durabright last time I checked had really decent archival life. Ultrachrome less so but well worth the exchange. But this is to be expected with pigments.

In response to the gp poster, last I checked LaserJets were laser and OfficeJets, DeskJets and DesignJets were ink. And JetDirect is their line of internal and external print servers.

In response to the gp poster, last I checked LaserJets were laser and OfficeJets, DeskJets and DesignJets were ink. And JetDirect is their line of internal and external print servers.

I'm sure HP has some pigment based solutions for their high end inkjets. Canon has some in their wide models, and plans to release an a3+ pigment printer, but it was slated for release last october and has been delated for spring 2007 the last time I checked. Epson is the way to go if you want archival inkjet, but I find the printers fickle and prone to clog.

Re:Bring out your dead

[Anonymous Coward]

HP introduced the first laser printer in 1984, called the Laserjet. They also introduced the first inkjet printer in 1984, called the Thinkjet. The names may be unfortunate but since they created the market and since Laserjet has always meant laser, perhaps you should blame yourself for your inability to figure things out instead of them.

Re:Bring out your dead

[QuickFox]

Yes, as the word "Jet" in "LaserJet" clearly indicates, it shoots jets of laser droplets onto the paper.

Re:Bring out your dead

[BillGatesLoveChild]

You hit the nail on the head there, Ivan!

  We use the local photo shop for prints, and my Canon LBP5200 for anything big where quality isn't an issue. I *do* still own an Inket though but *only* for printing CDs. Otherwise ink has gotten itself a real bad name.

Moderators: BTW my original post was modded a troll but it wasn't. (1) Everyone I've talked to about a printer has said they're sick of the expense of ink and were going to a laser, (2) LaserJet really was a dumb name. I've looked at them a few times in price lists and always wondered what the heck the were.

Lest we forget the pleasure of owning inkjet.

[jchap]

"Instead of having a print head that moves side to side like current inkjets, the print head spans the full width of the page, containing 70,400 nozzles in the A4 version"

Head cleaning in progress - Please wait.

Print nozzle check pattern.

Head cleaning in progress - Please wait.

Print nozzle check pattern.

Head cleaning in progress - Please wait.

Print nozzle check pattern.

Head cleaning in progress - Please wait.

Print nozzle check pattern. ...

Really skeptical at best...

[Pollux]

My reasons for being skeptical:

1. From the article: The cheap A4 desktop printer...is just one of the revolutionary new devices promised by Silverbrook, a company which holds more than 1400 patents, but has never released a product.
   
   So, they're patent whores for one. According to Silverbrook's website, they were founded in 1994. If you can't bring a product to market after filing over 1400 patents over 13 years, something's not adding up right. How does the business survive for 13 years without a product at market?
   
   
2. From the article: Other products that Silverbrook says will be made possible by the new technology are a $150, desktop photo printer that prints 30 photos per minute (shown in the video above). This is more than 10 times faster than all existing desktop products, and 2 to 3 times faster than the speediest competitor, HP's new Edgeline printer, which is not available in a retail product for ordinary consumers.
   
   So, HP, a huge corporation that's been in business for 68 years, resources and research labs that make you drool, can't figure out how to make an inkjet printer that prints a photo every two seconds, then a tiny little David-of-a-company, who's never ever made a single product before in their company history, is able to smack the giant down at their own game.
   
   
3. From the video: Things to be skeptical about: 1) You never see any blank paper, so how do you know that the printer is actually printing anything? 2) Each page comes out with ink completely dry and perfect. The ink alone should create at least a little wetness and curling. 3) On the A4 printer, where's the paper tray? I don't see any try in the back, which means it has to curl up from the bottom. But every page comes flat, no curl whatsoever. 4) On the A4 printer, the paper doesn't flop around like paper. It falls perfectly into place, like it has additional weight to it. Rather unnatural for a typical deskjet printer.
   
   
4. From the comment board: "LarryTWorth" writes, I admit, now I'm impressed. All the same, I'm curious to know how the will handle the problem of the ink drying up and blocking the printhead. With such small nozzles, it could be that they will get blocked more easily.
   
   Magically, two "anonymous" commenters write in reply:
   
   Interesting thought. But if they can do what they have done do you not think they have already thought of that solution. To spend what they must have spent to develop this, they would not release it only to be blocked by such a simple question as will the ink dry up. Come on world let's embrace the new thinkers and get a positive attitude,
   
   and, "Thats a good point. If i had to guess, I'd say they'll probably do what the newer HPs do, which is run ink from the cartridges quickly through the print head, then suck it back into the cartridge. On the other hand, clearly this company has a few tricks up their sleeves that HP can't touch, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had some new impressive technology that eliminates that problem, though that seems improbable."
   
   Amazingly positive for a pair of anonymous cowards. My apologies to both for not "embracing the new thinkers."
   
   
5. If you go to Silverbrook's own website, for having such marvelous new technology, I'm amazed to see how empty the website is, devoid of any real depth of information other than these new technologies that they herald. Plus, the company's headquarters are in Australia of all places. Any mates out there in New South Wales who care to check out this address for us: 393 Darling Street, Balmain NSW 2041 Australia ?

Re:Really skeptical at best...

[FlynnMP3]

My reasons for being less skeptical:

1) The company was formed at the early cusp of when businesses and lawyers started to realize that patents are the new way to do business. Not releasing a product for nearly 10 years is not surprising either. It is easy to get investors to float the company for that long, especially for a disruptive technology that this promises to be

2) Just a general statement about those entrenched or established in a market. Why would HP, whose major revenue comes from printers, endanger their cash flow by making a product that would decimate the current products?

3) a) They didn't think to put blank paper in the video. b) It impossible to know if the paper comes out completely dry when it is running that fast and the not being able to touch it. It may be damp but just look dry. c) A heavier stock, such as photo paper (obvious to see in the video) is being used. d )Somebody is off camera pulling the paper out of the way so the speed the paper comes out looks better.

4) 2 comments hardly make for astroturfing (or whatever the term is, I am not hip)

5) It's typical business to show hardly anything when a product hasn't been released yet.

All that said, it is healthy to show a cautious attitude in this age, when business are more interested in getting money than contributing to the standard of living.

Re:Really skeptical at best...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Things to be skeptical about: 1) You never see any blank paper

In fact if you look closely at the Wide Format segment, you can see that the paper roll used is NOT blank to begin with!

Oops.

Re:Really skeptical at best...

[Paradise Pete]

I don't see any try in the back, which means it has to curl up from the bottom. But every page comes flat, no curl whatsoever.

You do agree that paper is actually coming out of the printer, don't you? If so, it must be coming from somewhere, even if the demo is rigged.
I don't think calling a research company a "patent whore" is a strong argument, either. Many inventors license their inventions to manufacturers.

But I'm still skeptical.

Re:Really skeptical at best...

[femto]

Their building on google maps

I've never been able to figure out where they keep all their people. They claim to have hundreds of technical employees. The people I know say they work in Balmain. I gather they are spread across multiple terrace houses (the dominant type of building in the area), yet that seems like an awful lot of people to cram in and terrace houses hardly seem suited to housing labs. Maybe they have a significant lab elsewhere, or contract such work out? Anyone know?

I think it is serious. The principals used to work for Canon and used to design the chips which take care of the imaging parts of their laser printers. My understanding is that until now they mainly do the ideas, then license the patents.

Re:Really skeptical at best...

[mapkinase]

This is one of the most ridiculous pretentious replies I have ever seen on /.

I am actually stunned that for this particular subject Digg's discussion (which is "like", usually "amazingly" worse in quality than /.) have more quality to it.

"Paper not visible". Have you ever seen a printer before in your life?

"Patent whore". What is wrong with inventing something and selling it to other companies, so OTHER companies make products of it?

More facts, please, less baseless insinuations.

BTW, this is the first time I am hearing about this company. Now THAT is suspicious.

Re:Really skeptical at best...

[steelfood]

I wouldn't dare vouch for the company, but there are heavier papers out there than the usual 80-100 gsm. Photo paper in particular is much heavier, especially when saturated with ink. We don't know what kind of paper is being used, so we can't say much about these things. As for curling, it actually largely happens with laser printers and not so much with inkjets. The fuser heats up the paper as it is going by and causes the paper to curl. We can only assume they're using ink we know about, so we can't really talk about drying times either. But I'd think there'd be a little bit of smearing if the prints were landing on top of each other so quickly.

I wouldn't be surprised if other companies have abandoned similar research. After all, we all know there is still the problem with nozzle reliability, and if any one goes, all the prints would look pretty bad. The big players might have hit roadblocks and decided not to pursue this any further, perhaps until their other technologies (like ink or nozzle design) mature. It's not implausible that the real advance is a novel solution to the clogged nozzle problem.

1400 patents sounds like a patent troll. Perhaps they were collecting royalties from the big players all this time. And now that perhaps some of them are expiring, they're actually forced to create a product to keep the company alive. The announcement certainly sounds like an attempt to attract more investors.

However, the other points remain, and I am skeptical nonetheless. It's up in the air right now, but I'm sure we'll know in a few years time whether this turns out to be true or not. If it does, good for them, and good for us really (I'd like my camera to be able to print out small prints of photos). If not, oh well.

Re:Really skeptical at best...

[Arkiel]

1) I think the important question is whether or not any of those patents are currently being licensed by any of the big companies - there's a vector for revenue, right there.

2) Actual members of the industry seem to favor an artificial, incremental advancement to anything revolutionary.

3) The photo stock appears to be printed out on transparent plastic - the images appear slightly translucent in the video, I thought.

4) Yeah, that's pretty disgusting. Either employees or the most impressionable fanboy-material I can possibly imagine.

5) *shrugs* Entirely their prerogative? You wouldn't expect people developing shit for the express purpose of patenting it to have a day-by-day development blog, would you? Maybe they do all their pitching directly to companies and only need a bare commercial website.

It is not as though people are going to be making purchasing decisions without something a lot more concrete than a video demo (oh God, I hope) so right now all these guys can claim is that they "conned" the media. And maybe some loose investors.

Re:Really skeptical at best...

[nietsch]

Ha! Balmain is hardly a business district in Sidney. It has lots of shop and residential houses and maybe some offices here or there. It's a nice place, but not what you would expect from a high-tech company. There is however a postoffice on darling street, maybe their suite is housed there in a PO box?
Sadly I can't check as I don't live there anymore.

Re:Really skeptical at best...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, checked it out... In fact I have a relative who works there.

As you say, how did the company survive for 13 years without bringing a product to market? They survive (and have prospered) by doing research and leasing the resulting IP to interested companies. If you look at their patent portfolio you'd see that they own the inkjet market. I'd be confident that half the printing technology that HP, Canon etc. use was leased from Silverbrook. I don't think you can call them patent whores when they create the IP themselves and willingly sell it to others.

It may seem strange they they don't market the products themselves but really it's simple. By not worrying about end-user support, marketing and the like they can focus their money on research - which is what they're good at.

The reason their website is so sparse is because they're a very secretive company, as they must be when all their income relies on new research. In fact they didn't have a website at all until this week.

Is this new?

[Ed Avis]

Surely this is the old idea of the line printer applied to inkjets. Line printers bashed out a whole line of text at a time, rather than moving a print head from side to side, and are the reason why anything to do with printing in Unix begins 'lp'.

Re:Is this new?

[greed]

That was my first reaction, too. It's exactly a dot-matrix line printer. Just ink jet instead of impact, and with all the dots instead of 1/8 of them and a slightly moving "comb".

How long does the ink last before it fades?

[spacepimp]

I currently use anepson for photographic printing for one main reason: the archival nature of the ink set. If i am using a memjet as a photo printer (if you notice that is what they are printing photographs) then the most important question is how long until the photo fades. sure i can can print out a poster in a second or two, but if it fades in a year what good is the photograph? i highly doubt people are going to buy what seems presented as a photo printer to print out pamphlets, just as i'm not going to buy a color laser printer or the xerox phaser to print out photos. Snapfish is useful if you went on vacation and printed out all 300 photos to bore your friends. there is a lack of detail and once again as far as i know snapfish photos besides looking as poor as polaroid photos aren't archival either. So as exciting as it is that this company might make a printer, that is fast, has a decent print quality, and cheaper inks, if the inks fade in a year like most hp photoprinters canon etc, then its worthless for the most part, especially to any professional photographer. which is exactly why epson cornered that market, because the ultrachrome inkset last without fading for 75 plus years.

Re:How long does the ink last before it fades?

[swordgeek]

Is Epson archival ink actually archival now? A few years ago I was looking at it, and despite their claims, there was a lot of rigorous evidence to the contrary. Have they fixed the problem yet?

Re:How long does the ink last before it fades?

[pyite]

Snapfish is useful if you went on vacation and printed out all 300 photos to bore your friends. there is a lack of detail and once again as far as i know snapfish photos besides looking as poor as polaroid photos aren't archival either.

First off, you need to use punctuation and capitalize things. Second, while I cannot speak directly to Snapfish's technology (though I would bet it's similar if not identical), Shutterfly uses Fuji Frontier printers which "paint" light on traditional photographic paper. Specifically, Shutterfly uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper. It is then developed like it was a print made from film. Notice "Archive" in the name. When properly fixed and washed, Crystal Archive prints will last longer on average than inkjet. If you could take prints off the wall in galleries and museums, you would see that most color prints are on Crystal Archive paper. This should tell you something.

Re:How long does the ink last before it fades?

[spacepimp]

@Pyite: The paper doesn't fade, the inks\film fade the paper at worst yellows. As for Snapfish my concern was with the inks they use, not the impurities in the paper type. I am very well aware that the paper quality changes the lifespan of the image, however that was outside what the scope of what my concerns were with Snapfish. If what you are saying is accurate then, it is film level print quality. I have trouble believing this is the case due to the lack of details I have seen in things such as leaves, hair, and almost every Snapfish print I have seen. These are Nikon d2x and Nikon d80 images sent to print via Snapfish. Secondly how do you color match/Profile you colors and get them printed accurately? I can and do take prints off of gallery walls, and could give a damn what you think of my grammar.

Re:How long does the ink last before it fades?

[pyite]

The paper doesn't fade, the inks\film fade the paper at worst yellows.

With photo paper the two are one and the same. There is no "ink." The dye is embedded in paper and revealed by chemical processes using silver halide crystals. Snapfish isn't as transparent as what they use as Shutterfly. But, I would bet Snapfish uses traditional photo processes as well.

Secondly how do you color match/Profile you colors and get them printed accurately?

Shutterfly calibrates to sRGB, so if you are calibrated to sRGB, you should match with them. Here is information about their use of Crystal Archive paper. While Shutterfly is more expensive, knowing how they print is worth the extra money.

Re:How long does the ink last before it fades?

[spacepimp]

This is a good argument for the use of Shutterfly and perhaps Snapfish. I have already invested in an Epson 2200 A friend has Epson 3800, and an Epson 9500 (which gives me free use of the two devices, excepting material costs). However they are slow, color matching even with careful profiling is difficult, and the archival qualities are exaggerated by the Wilhelm institute. Back to the printer in discussion, i wonder still about the qualities of the inks, and how long they last before fading in controlled lighting. Thanks for the information on the two photo print services. I will look into them and try a few prints. Almost all of my experience is on the digital end of photography, after having seen nightmarish mis development of film i decided i wanted to micromange as much as possible. Nikon d80 and d2x

Not new...and perhaps a maintenance nightmare

[PalmKiller]

OK, so let me get this obvious marketing monster straight. They are re-inventing the old mainframe line printer (dot matrix that printed a line at a time) as a inkjet printer. Thats all well and good, cause all us old timers know that a line printer can really slam out the pages...but the inkjet part is scary. I have enough trouble with the little heads on inkjet cartridges drying out, how have they tackled that real world problem on this full width head? Also since its obviously going to need a new head from time to time, isn't this full width head gonna be much more expensive? If you print a lot of text, I say get a decent laser printer for fast printing and use cheaper standard inkjet for what little color you do. if you print huge amount of color, look at dye sublimation, solid ink or color laser printer. If you print very little, then just get the standard inkjet. IMHO of course.

Re:Not new...and perhaps a maintenance nightmare

[SpinyNorman]

Yep - line printers could certainly crank it out. I remember over 30 years ago visiting a datacenter and being wowed by those things - they showed one that neeed to use a partial vaccuum to suck the paper out of the printer it was coming out so fast.

But, if you really want speed then I don't know if anything can beat a mainframe page printer - it prints a full page at a time by writing to an electrostatically charged drum that picks up the ink - same technology as photocopiers.

Here's one reason to believe it's wrong

[Moraelin]

Here's one reason to believe it's wrong: it's already happened before. Repeatedly. So it's not even some guess, it's just having a working memory.

Let's even assume that this company is genuinely honest and believes in that model. Tough luck, HP isn't. HP is at this time little more than an overpriced ink and paper company, and the printers are sold under price to get you hooked on buying their ink. So what happens is:

1. Company X hits the market with a great new printer that costs $200 and ink costing $0.4 per ml. (Which is what $20 per 50ml cartridge means.)

2. HP makes a clone that costs $100 and gouges you for a hefty $4 per ml for ink.

Watch lemmings flock to get HP's version because it's cheaper.

Better yet, HP is teh big brand name and has seemingly endless advertising money, while Company X is the new kid on the block and noone's heard of them. Let's buy a HP for mom's photos, they're probably better, right? Or for that matter, let's buy a whole bunch of HPs for the office, because they're such a big company, while Company X could go bankrupt by tomorrow. And nothing scares the pants off management more than dealing with a small company that could be gone overnight.

And if Company X is not gone overnight, eventually it gets tired of having its sales undercut by HP crap, so it pulls the same stunt. Or it gets bought by HP. Or it goes big enough to go public, and Wall Street starts screaming for blood because the shares aren't growing as fast as they'd like. Or whatever. Cue new Deluxe model which costs $100 for the printer and $4 for the ink. And the old one is silently phased out, to make room for the new models.

Re:Here's one reason to believe it's wrong

[jandrese]

Or more often, you buy the more expensive printer because you hear how good it is online, and then discover you can't buy replacement ink cartridges for love or money after a year or so.

Re:Here's one reason to believe it's wrong

[Niten]

2. HP makes a clone that costs $100 and gouges you for a hefty $4 per ml for ink.

Fortunately for Silverbrook, it sounds like they have several patents on their technology. HP won't be able to sink Memjet by cloning this printer, because HP would have to pay them royalties for each clone sold. Silverbrook could even prevent HP from copying it altogether if they desired.

But this is all assuming that Silverbrook actually wants to sell these things itself. If their core business is indeed licensing patents, then it's possible that they just wanted to come up with a prototype to scare the pants off of the big inkjet manufacturers. Make a nice press release with a cool video, and stir up coverage with promises of inexpensive ink, and soon HP, Epson, Canon, and all the others will be knocking at the door, asking how they can license this for their own use.

If Silverbrook genuinely wants to sell us cheap Memjet ink, then HP won't be able to stop them. But it's entirely possible that they would prefer to license Memjet to would-be competitors, in which case your prediction comes true; everyone carries on as before.

Re:Here's one reason to believe it's wrong

[jonbryce]

Surely having a big cartridge that goes across the whole length of the page to make things faster is "obvious", even to the muppets at the US Patent Office? As in, even more obvious than having a small cartridge that goes left and right across the page to save money on nozzles.

Re:Here's one reason to believe it's wrong

[Avatar8]

Exactly what products are you comparing and where are you shopping?

From my experience, HP is more expensive than Canon, Epson or even Lexmark. In consumer products, Epson is typically the longer lasting, better quality and least expensive. This is ironic considering that Canon invented the inkjet technology that they all use.

What disgusts me about inkjet printers is that they are designed to be throw-aways. They are never worth repairing; you just toss them and buy a new one. My last company went through 12 inkjets and a year's worth of ink before we were able to show them the invoices and projected costs of how a color laser is more cost effective.

I think this technology will eliminate current inkjet technology. I just hope it goes to all printer companies and HP doesn't somehow grab it exclusively for themselves. We'd see those projected cost savings disappear immediately.

Looks like OKI

[Flying pig]

I think your Xerox printers may be rebranded OKI (LED printing is an OKI technology). The reason they are fast is everything to do with the processor, software and print resolution, and little to do with the technology.

That said, the OKI printers seem to be good workhorses and they have some nice features (very easy consumable replacement and good reporting, for two things). Unusually, they also measure the drum life rather than assuming it to be fixed. For relatively high output, especially on faster runs, I think they are good value. They should have the advantage of relatively accurate scaling because of the fixed pitch LEDs, whereas laser printers can have scaling errors across the print due to any variations during the scan.

In fact, Xerox have done quite a good job of optimising output across their range. Marketing bull aside, their processors and software are reasonably fast in color, while some competitors advertise massive engine speeds which are dragged down to squilch by any kind of heavy color image use. Fine for hinted business pages, hopeless for photos.

Re:Looks like OKI

[Anonymous Coward]

Marketing bull aside

Xerox fail at marketing. They advertised those printers on Slashdot a while back, and totally failed to come up with the slogan "Phasers set to stun".

For those old enough, it's called a LINE PRINTER

[SSHGuru]

Yes, 25 years ago they had LINE printers. They were very fast, as big as a table. Old concept, new technology - I'll believe it when I see it.

It is real

[The New Andy]

My brother was one of the engineers who worked on it. He was always very secretive about it, but they aren't some dodgy company that makes fake videos and stuff. They are a real company that has lots of cool equipment and smart people working for them. So, since I've seen a person who has seen one of these prototypes in real life, and now you have read it on slashdot, it is basically confirmed :-)

Re:It is real

[Liberaltarian]

So, since I've seen a person who has seen one of these prototypes in real life, and now you have read it on slashdot, it is basically confirmed :-)

You certainly have a keen grasp of the average Slashdotter's evidentiary requirements!

Re:It is real

[HarvardAce]

So, since I've seen a person who has seen one of these prototypes in real life, and now you have read it on slashdot, it is basically confirmed :-)

I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it!

A secretive company

[femto]

Here's an article about Silverbrook.

They are located in the inner city suburb of Sydney in Australia. They are also secret to the point of seeming to be paranoid. I know lots of people who have interviewed with them and some employees. You have to sign an NDA just to get an interview with them. A shame really. As the article said, they do high tech stuff, but are so secretive there is little contribution to or cross pollination with the rest of Australia's high tech sector.

As far as I can tell they do a fair bit of MEMS stuff. A lot of the people they employ are integrated circuit designers. I don't think they are much into Free Software philosophy.

Re:A secretive company

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to talk about this, but I can't. Seriously!

Re:For those old enough, it's called a LINE PRINTE

[Keith_Beef]

You beat me to it.

I remember these as Band Printers. Very fast, very noisy, and the machine was around three times the width of the paper.

I briefly worked with IBM Chain printers in the mid eighties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_printer

Beef.

Indigo exists and isn't cheap

[Flying pig]

The suspicion about this is that it is basically what an Indigo printer does (for those who have managed to avoid working in the print industry so far, Indigo is a full-width A3/11 by 17 inkjet based commercial printer line bought some years back by HP and now sold by them.) The Indigo has singularly failed to conquer the world. It isn't particularly fast for a variety of reasons, it is very expensive indeed (well into 6 digits) and only a few specialist companies seem to want it. It's hard to believe that a company which doesn't have the resources of HP could suddenly produce a half million dollar printer for a few hundred dollars.

The fact is, color lasers are getting remarkably good and really quite cheap for what they do. Here's a free plug for Xerox: their latest generation really is pretty good, even if one A3 model looks somewhat like a rebranded OKI. And the latest generation of their solid ink technology (not suitable for frequent handling but very good for things like POS) really is a knockout. So much so that they are providing samples in their latest promotional pack. HP of course are confused: they don't actually make laser printers, they design inkjets, but DesignJets aren't cheap (which is another reason to be suspicious of the article), their latest high capacity inkjet is not as cheap as you might expect, and the Business Inkjets are kind of OK but not Earth-conquering. If anybody has a world beating low cost inkjet technology it should be HP. Are they worried about eating up their revenues from toner sales, which they get without ever even handling toner? Possibly.

Re:Indigo exists and isn't cheap

[swordgeek]

The problem is that HP hasn't yet recovered from the blight of Carly Fiorina, and is no longer capable of worthwhile R&D. Still, you're right--either this is a complete scam, or it's a significantly different (and cheaper!) technology than what HP has been using in the Indigo.

Hard to believe that a company without the resources of HP or Xeros can do this, but it'd be neat if they can.

Re:Indigo exists and isn't cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

An Indigo doesn't have printheads though, so while they have their problems, massive printhead clogging isn't one of them. So that's neat.

Re:Indigo exists and isn't cheap

[chebucto]

Are you sure HP doesn't make laser printers? They certainly sell HP-branded laser printers (their LaserJet and ColorLaserJet lines).

Doesn't Look Legit

[jonesy16]

So they claim in the article that the printhead is a full 8" wide on the A4/letter size printer. A4 paper, however, is about 8.3 inches wide, leaving a full 1/3 of an inch of white space on the paper. When you watch the video though, notice that the A4 printer spits out two text pages followed by a series of pages with full width graphics that, with my eyes, I can't see any gap on the sides of the pages. Seem legit to you?

Re:Doesn't Look Legit

[ambrosen]

The article translates 8 inches as 21.3cm, or 3mm wider than a sheet of A4.

Awesome!

[whiskeyriver]

Now I can use the new office printer to print out those vacation photos I've been sittin' on, and do it so quickly my boss can't catch me!!

Extensive experience filling the previous series..

[Futurepower(R)]

KDawson is a Slashdot editor who doesn't know much about writing, apparently: "If it's for real, the technology would be disruptive at half the speed and twice the price" should be "... the technology would be disruptive if it were half the speed and twice the price."

There's no mention that the ink of the new printer is said to be 1/5 the price.

Our extensive experience with refilling Canon ink cartridges of the the previous series of Canon printers is below, it is rewritten from a comment posted in October of 2004.

We don't have any information about refilling the cartridges in Canon's Pixma series of printers, the most recent series. If you have information please provide it.

Old series of Canon printers: 26 refills, $17. Color printing is a serious hassle. After having many problems, we spent a lot of time researching it. We bought a Canon S820 and a Canon S520, and we have had good luck refilling the cartridges using a kit from IMS, which we bought at a Costco store. The refill kit is NOT available on the Costco web site. Each kit allows something like 26 refills, and the kits cost $17 at the Costco store. The second time you do a refill, it is extremely easy. We inspected photos and font characters under a magnifying glass and were not able to see a difference between the hugely expensive Canon ink and the refill ink. There has been no difference in fading.

The S820 has 6 separate cartridges. It is very slow, but photos are much nicer. The S520 has 4 cartridges. It's faster, and good for printing labels, for example. We have had no problems with print heads, which are separate from the tanks. Both use the same refill kit, which comes with 6 ink colors.

Buy low. Then buy low again. Our experience is that it is far better to pay $50 for a printer, and replace it often with a new $50 printer, than to pay a lot and buy a "good one". The technology is changing so fast that the $50 printer of a few months from now will be better than the $400 printer sold now.

HP: Ugh. In the past we have bought several HP color printers, and been badly burned. HP is expensive, and we have encountered many quirks. (Our experience has been that Carly Fiorino, former CEO of HP, destroyed the company, and it has stayed destroyed. we see a lot of HP printer software seriously failing, right out of the box. Can someone with little technical experience lead a technically oriented company? It's like a horse that can do math. It appears to be possible, until you realize that it is just a series of tricks.)

Canon: Canon is an extremely adversarial company, in our experience, but less adversarial than the other printer manufacturers, at present.

Canon does product churning, and apparently deliberate product confusion. Before, all the companies sold 6 tank printers as "photo printers". Now Canon is selling 4 or 5 tank printers as photo printers. The Canon USA web site has liberal use of web developer resume-building technologies like Flash and Javascript that tend to defeat use of Mozilla's tabs, and provide for menu choice surprises. There are extremely long URIs which are difficult to email.

The Canon i860 is not related to the S820. Note that the web page says, "... it provides true 4 color photo printing...". One day a few months ago, the InkJet printer companies switched from "true 6 color photo printing" to the present "true 4 color photo printing". I don't know their motivation, but the 6 color printers print MUCH nicer photos, in our experience, with much better shadow detail. Tech company marketing departments take extreme advantage of any ignorance they find in customers.

Testing in the store:

Fake

[izzyllamas]

This is obviously fake, they are using magic marker technology to make it seem like its printing.

Separate CMYK is a great!

[Chris.Nelson]

It looks from the photos as if the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black inks are in separate cartridges. That's a GREAT improvement over throwing out a half-full color cartridge because you used up one of the colors!

Re:Separate CMYK is a great!

[Anonymous Coward]

For the record, there are plenty of printers now that have separate ink cartridges. The Epson Stylus CX6600 that I got 2-3 years ago uses one for each ink.

Re:Separate CMYK is a great!

[Acer500]

As the AC already replied, there are lots of printers that have separate cartridges.

HP Business Inkjets for one, some Epson lines too.

Re:Separate CMYK is a great!

[Tim C]

Indeed. I have an Epson Stylus CX6600 (an all in one scanner/printer) which uses separate CMYK cartridges.

70,400 holes to clog

[AmiMoJo]

One of the biggest problems I have always had with inkjets is them clogging up. I don't print that often, and between prints the ink always dries up and clogs. I have had technicians out to change the heads over several times after not using the printer for a few weeks. Even a normal person who goes on holiday for a few weeks would be screwed.

70,400 holes sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. If one gets clogged... well, you can waste a few litres of ink running cleaning cycles to fix it.

In the end, I got a black and white HP laser for £80 which is fast and reliable. Shame colour lasers are still expensive (especially toner).

Memo to self

[mattr]

Don't announce next paradigm-breaking product just before April Fool's Day.

Sounds nice but I'll believe it when I see it. How about a print sample blowup?

No, actually

[Flying pig]

This just isn't true at all. Who modded it insightful? Rasterisation is a bottleneck, otherwise why do you think commercial printers need special purpose raster processing engines? Check a few specifications and you will see that processor speeds and memory scale quite fast with page size, emulations and number of colours. There is a reason for that.

Interesting....

[durin]

If I make a critical comment on their homepage it doesn't seem to show up (I've waited for 30 minutes for it to show up).

Re:Interesting....

[stevesliva]

If I make a critical comment on their homepage it doesn't seem to show up (I've waited for 30 minutes for it to show up).

Well, I don't know that it's "their" homepage. Also note that the page in question is now slashdotted.

Reminds me of the old days

[tedgyz]

When I worked at Wang in the late 80's, we had a couple of high-speed band printers* the size of chest freezers. They could spew paper at an alarming rate. You had to form-feed past 4 pages to get your printout. It was a remarkable paper waster. A service tech once showed my what happens when you short out the form-feed circuit - a flurry of paper.

* For you yung'uns, a band printer had a rotating metal band stamped with characters. It spun about as fast as a band saw. It had an ink ribbon

Re:Extensive experience filling the previous serie

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't have any information about refilling the cartridges in Canon's Pixma series of printers, the most recent series. If you have information please provide it.

The ink tanks for Pixma have "smart" chips that count how much ink they've dispensed. In theory this protects the print head from overheating due to an empty ink tank. But, also it means that if you want to refill the tank, you'll have to find a way to reset or replace the chip.

I've not attempted this. Most of the comments I've seen online just assume the tank is spent.

Possible Solution to the Inkjet Nozzle Issue

[ironwill96]

People are commenting on the issue of nozzles drying up if you don't use it very often. Assuming they haven't solved that issue, you may not have to replace the entire printhead if a few nozzles go bad. It looks like there are 11 "Memjet" chips in a standard Letter sized printhead (they show a video of the joint between nozzle chips on their website). So perhaps you can replace just one of the chips if that section of the print head goes bad?

Another solution to a non-problem

[billcopc]

I really like how this company went and built a solution to a problem that's been obsolete for years. Ink-jet printers suck by design. They could have been great and cheap, but much like cancer and diabetes, it is far more profitable to treat the symptoms than to "waste" time solving the problem at the source. We end up with cheap devices that go belly-up at least once a year, drink ink like a Scotsman on st-patty's, and clog/jam/seize if you leave them alone for more than a day.

For those of us who can do basic math, we sum up the cost of replacing printers and ink over a few years, spend that amount on a decent laser printer and enjoy hassle-free printing for years to come. Guess what: laser drums cover the whole page width, and toner's cheap! I can refill my toner cartridge with a $20.00 bottle of toner dust, that will last me several thousand pages.

The printer scammers have already jumped onto the laser bus, and are now flooding the market with cheap color lasers that cost about the same as a premium ink-jet. What's even better is those cheap lasers eat toner like their big sisters eat ink, so you get the convenience of the word "Laser" appearing all over the box, and you won't need to adjust your budget because the new printer costs just as much to maintain as the old piece of shite.

Re:Another solution to a non-problem

[ExRex]

The Scots don't celebrate St. Patrick's Day. The patron of Scotland is St. Andrew. His feast day is November 30.
It's the Irish who drink to excess on Patrick's Day.

I mention this in the interest of ethnographically correct slurs.

Wet pages?

[Forkenhoppen]

That printer better have a blow-dryer attached to the business end, 'cause otherwise those pages are going to end up with pictures on both sides..

Wide format?

[Overzeetop]

If they can reliably produce a 36" or 42" wide unit that can run with pigment inks at 3-4c/SF in ink cost (5% coverage/black only) for under $2000, they could take over the small architecture and engineering market. Right now, HP sells their cheapest full color 24" unit for almost $2000, and it takes more than 3 minutes per inch. Want 36" or faster output - you're looking at $5k. And laser at this size won't even giv you a sniff below $20k, and you're likely to spend $250/mo in technician costs just keeping it running.

Now we need a skeptical /.er in Balmain.

[nietsch]

But I can check on maps.google.com, just type in the addres.
It all depends on how accurate the numbering is, but it suggests they are opposite the post office, not located in it.
Now we need a skeptical /.er in Balmain to check out their addres. (And then what? I dunno)

Re:Now we need a skeptical /.er in Balmain.

[Magura]

They exist. Their offices don't have big flashy signs out the front, but they certainly exist.

Otherwise a whole lot of people I know must just disappear into a hole every day when they claim to be at work ...

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing that with a couple exceptions (mostly the ones marked 'funny') every single post that appears under the article asks questions or makes claims opposed to information prominently stated in the article.

Smudges?

[works]

That ink has to have a seriously fast wet-to-dry time.. It it spews pages out that fast, how can you keep the ink on the page intact if the next page shooting out of the printer on top of the previous one is going to make contact in just a few seconds?

Re:Smudges?

[moeinvt]

I wondered the same thing, but I think the designers must have solved this.

I doubt that it's related to the ink's chemical properties. My guess is that having so many thousand tiny heads spraying the ink provides significant air exposure. Seems like a fine mist originating from many point sources would dry faster than a big stream coming from a large head moving back and forth.

Printer makers

[Flying pig]

The earliest LaserJets had Canon engines, but HP is no longer exclusively Canon. What HP do provide is printer software (firmware and client), which they are good at, and a supply chain which, while expensive, is effective. They also come up with good specification points and physical designs.This gives them a large corporate market share. But they are NOT a manufacturing company. You'll be suggesting next they make their HP-branded notebooks and PCs.

The entire electronics industry survives on very few actual manufacturers. Samsung OEMs a lot of small printers, so I believe does Lexmark.

Go Ricoh

[walt-sjc]

I recently picked up a Ricoh C410DN for $900 for my home office. 15K page toner that runs under $600 for a set (about 4 cents / page.) If you mostly print black, that toner is cheaper and only runs about 2 cents per page. No maint until 100K pages where it will cost you $350 for the kit. Yeah, it comes with 5K starter toner, but what printer doesn't come with starters? It's fast too. 10 secs FPO, and runs 26ppm color - duplexing only a little slower at 24 sides / min! The C411DN, for $250 more, does 31ppm.

Contrast that with my last Epson inkjet, which I paid $400 for, and only got about 100 pages out of before it went in the garbage can. Hey, that's only $4 / page! Considering that the ink carts were rated at 400 pages for $35 each, it works out to 35 cents per page. Of course each cleaning cycle uses about 20 pages worth of ink, and you have to run it 5 times every time you print (yes, I'm kidding a little, but not by much,) it's closer to 50 cents.

Why did I throw the epson in the garbage? I couldn't clean the permanent head that you can't clean without disassembling the printer (a multi-hour job.) I called support and they wouldn't talk to me claiming the printer was out of warranty, unless I wanted to pay $25...

Even cheap ink refills can't touch the 4 cents per page laser cost, and definitely can't touch the speed. Quality? Well, if you can get the inkjet to print without banding, then yes the inkjet is better for photos. Inkjets still suck for text however which is 95% of my needs. The other 4.99% of the time I need business color (web pages, charts, etc.) Photos are only 0.01% of my printing. After going through every major brand of inkjet over the past 10 years, I just won't buy another inkjet - EVER.

I wouldn't call the Ricoh a photo printer, but at 1200x1200 it's better than inkjet's were just a few years ago, so the output is nice enough. If I want true photo quality, I use my little thermal transfer kodak 4x6 printer, or upload them to a photo site. It also has true Postscript / PCL support, and works with all OS's with no special drivers (although the drivers give you access to advanced features.)

As for your HP, the only thing the 5550 has over the ricoh is 11x17 support (my office has a 5550 too.) The Ricoh beats the HP hands down in all other areas. IMHO, HP printers are overpriced (base unit and supplies.)

Re:Go Ricoh

[drinkypoo]

The assertion that many people have made to me is that Ricohs are unreliable. Regardless, 11x17 support is a must. I use the 5550 to print tabloid-size posters for internal advertising use (on the casino floor.) They look damned good and I can print them "just in time". I sure would love to be able to do 22x30s, though.

Video mirror

[zapwow]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996259363 769507120&hl=en

I want ream sized paper holders as standard!

[kabocox]

Ream sized paper trays need to be standard for all printers today. Why? Just so it would be easy to open the package of paper and dump the whole thing easily into the paper tray. Apparently this is something so tech. difficult it costs $200-$300 as an option on high end lasers. I'm thrilled that color laser prices have been dropping down to the $250-$300 range, but I'd like to be able to load some paper at home and forget about it. At the office, it's easy to have 6 reams of paper on a shelf somewhere near the laser printer, when you open a ream of paper, it's really annoying that some of these ink jets can only hold 50-75 sheets of paper. Heck, my color laser will only hold 350 pages without the ream paper tray option that costs ever so much. I can under stand them reaming us on inkcarts, but why can't they make a decent ream sized paper tray for the home user?

They say it is possible. Who has experience?

[Futurepower(R)]

Companies claim it is possible. I was asking for the experiences of people who had actually done it. Note that both sets of instructions say you can just press a button for 5 seconds, and the Canon printers won't check for ink. It appears that, by being less abusive than other printer companies, Canon is slowly taking over the market (until the Memjet printers discussed in the Slashdot article are released):

Canon ink cartridge refill kits for the latest series of printers:
http://www.inksupply.com/cankits.cfm

http://www.atlanticinkjet.com/ink-cartridge-refill s-canon-PGI-5,CLI-8BK.asp

Refill instructions

More refill instructions:
http://www.bsprintcartridges.com/canon-pgi5-refill -instructions.htm

Better link

[moeinvt]

http://www.memjet.com/media.aspx

(I was having trouble with the original link. This one's working right now)

DOA

[mpapet]

There's a number of critical errors with the parent post, hopefully it won't get modded up.

1. Inkjets spray ink onto the page and they (kind of) layer ink too. That's why you don't get the pretty lines on your PHB's Visio diagram. They can actually get higher lines per millimeter than a laser printer. The transfer method relies on paper acting like a sponge. Try containing a drop of dye to a pretty circle on your kitchen sponge. Same idea. It turns out photos look great because your eyes are so busy and the colors/shapes so discontinuous. Simple printing method.

2. Laser's transfer the ink from a drum onto a page, then kind of cook the ink to make it stick to the page. The paper acts much less like a sponge and the way the ink is delivered to the drum is quite x/y precise but the drums cannot set inks up at very high lines per millimeter. They can't do some of the inkjet tricks. Great Visio diagrams, very complicated printing method.

Finally, these guys don't have a chance. Once they show it to the OEM's. The "not invented here" attitude at those conglomerates coupled with their ability to knock off what was just demo'ed means they should just close up shop or build the entire printer themselves and show no one how they do it.

Note to printing geeks, I have glossed over how 4/6/8 inks make many colors to make a point.

Re:DOA

[NeilTheStupidHead]

So it depends on what you're printing, really. I don't print photos, just text documents or circuit diagrams, so a B&W laser is ideal for me. I had an IJ that printed absolutely beautiful colour photos, but continually had alignment problems with diagrams and schematics. I had to run the alignment program at least once a day. At a guess, I'd say I wasted more than 100 pages re-printing useless diagrams before chucking the whole thing aside for a laser (which was no more expensive than the IJ) which has worked flawlessly ever since.

FWIW my pixma doesn't clog

[cellocgw]

I've had a Canon pixma 4000 for a couple years now. I'd say we print something less than once a week, and even more rarely in color. I can still queue up a photo and photo-glossy paper and get a perfect print out. Maybe my house as just the right humidity :-) but clogging has not been a problem.

linux compatibility

[Krishnoid]

My trusty Canon LBP5200 Color Laser Printer is just fine and dandy thank you.

Too bad it's not usable under Free software O/S's.

Head clogging

[DrVomact]

Actually, HP solved the inkjet print head clogging problem quite a while ago...in a sense. As far as I can tell, HP Deskjet printers are the only ones in which the print head and the cartridge are one and the same. That means if your head clogs, you throw away the cartridge, not the printer. Of course, if you consider the price of cartridges, you might just be ahead if you dump the printer.

Re:Head clogging

[Debug0x2a]

Actually a lot of Lexmark catridges have build in print heads as well. Also, this makes the price of the cartridge even more to replace, so its effectively a lose/lose situation. Inkjet printers are great if you print out lots of photos, but for the average user it seems that the most effective printer will just about always be a laser. We had our HP Laserjet 4L for over 10 years and just now replaced it with a Color Laserjet 2600N and gave the working 4L to my friend.

Cleaning Cartridge?

[Maxo-Texas]

Has any of these companies considered having a large cleaning cartridge that has inexpensive cleaner (alcohol?) in it (that you can refill)?

They could treat it as a 9th pigment color.

After you printed and there was not another page in the buffer, it could print with the cleaning pigment and clean the heads (before the ink got completely set up).

HP's got that today too - priced for corporate use

[chancycat]

HP's got ink-based page-wide printing today: priced for the enterprise though. Scaling it down for home and small-office use is under development I am sure. Reliability is a challenge when price is a priority.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/feature_stories/ 2006/06edgeline.html

That is fast for an inkjet.

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw the demo and that is fast for an inkjet. For speed it gives laserjet run for the money. However inkjet refill cartridges are too expensive for what you do with them as for price per page. Laserjets printer are expensive other then overall price per page is lower then inkjet unless you refill inkjet cartridges or get re-manufactured ones.

No need to apologize

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you're a 'tard'. Your signature made that abundantly clear.

Why?

[suggsjc]

Do people still print? I don't, unless you mean print to file. Just about everything I do, I try to get it in digital form. I then store it in a place that is routinely backed up...soo much easier to search from something that is indexable.

Ok, that was written 1/3 truth, 1/3 sarcasm and 1/3 trolling. But seriously, I think my generation and the following generations are going to want to print less, so maybe by the time they actually get printing figured out it will be a non-issue.

Nothing new to see here

[stevewa]

Tektronix (Now Xerox) developed full-width printhead technology (with wax inkjet instead of aqueous ink) YEARS ago.

What horseshit.

[Frosty Piss]

How is the parent Flamebait? Honstly. There ARE different grades of swabs, and I don't really see how communicating my personal experience that swabs have caused me no problems is considered Flamebait. What horseshit.

Am I the only one that does this?

[Fyzzler]

I am on my 9th inkjet printer in the past four years. When you can go to Walmart/Staples or Best Buy and pick up last years closeout model inkjet for $29-$39 and the ink refills ran $69, It was far more economical for me to trash my inkjet printer every 3-4 months when the cartridges ran out than to buy refills.

Recently, the economics have changed a little. Walmart sells their base model Lexmark inkjet printer for regular price of $19.95 and the single cartridge refill is also $19.95, so I currently buy one or two refills before trashing the printer for a new model, as the cost is the same either way, and it is slightly less hassle to change the ink cartridge then to disconnect and reconnect the USB and power cable on a new printer.

When the ink runs low, I check the print quality, if it is good, I buy a refill, if it has degraded, I pitch the printer for a new one. Always buy an inkjet that comes with full sized cartridges and not "Starter" ones, and if you buy last years discontinued/closeout model, you can get a higher quality or more featurefull printer for rock bottom pricing. I recommend that nobody should ever pay more than $39 for an inkjet.

The only thing I really feel bad about is the growing stack of inkjet printers that are/will be accumulating in landfills from the ridiculous Razor Blade business model the printer companies are using. Inkjet refill prices have dropped by 1/2 to 2/3 in the past year so I think the printer companies are finally starting to move to a more balanced business model. I can't be the only person junking inkjets left and right when the ink runs out, so change is inevitable.

Re:Am I the only one that does this?

[billcopc]

So you're saying you've spent upwards of $300-400 on "disposable" printers in the last four years, plus all the time you've spent shopping for bargains and fussing with repetitive head cleaning and whatnot. Maybe your time is free, but mine certainly isn't. I'd rather spend the same amount of money, maybe even a teeny bit more on a single reliable printer that outlasts your 9 inkjets, and never gives me any trouble. What's even better is that when my printer runs out of ink, it costs me no more than yours to refill, or when the cartridge starts to get old I could spend $50 to get it replaced. The difference is that refill/replacement will last me another 2-3 years, whereas your next $20 might last you 6 months.

It's a bigger investment up-front, but you end up saving money (and time). It's not like printers are a rapidly advancing technology, a laser printer from eight years ago prints every bit as good as a brand new model, in fact the older ones tend to jam less often thanks to better workmanship.

Disruptive effect on the ink market

[TClevenger]

This will have an interesting effect on the current inkjet printer/ink market. If a printer can print even 5 pages a minute at photo quality, it will drastically shift how much people use it--at least until they realize that they blew through $75 in cartridges in 20 minutes. Just as laser printer makers have had to increase the yield of their cartridges as printing speeds increased (some low-end workgroup Laserjets have cartridges that last 20,000 pages), inkjets will have to change as well.

nothing new here - its not fast

[my_furry_butt]

Inkjet is vastly inferior to laser in every measure except cost/page.

For their larger version, it is slow. Our new full colour continuous feed laser (not sheet feed, we have a cutter and merger to create the sheets) does over 1000 pages per minute. If your going to go into commercial bureau-style printing, inkjet will never give you the quality you need to blow customers socks off.

wtf is wrong with you people

[Anonymous Coward]

really wtf is wrong with you people? Does everything conversed about inkjet printers have to be about low-level bargain basement. I thought this was slashdot where the readership typically buys computers that cost between $2,000 ~ $10,000. WHY then are you subjecting your expensive computers to use crappy ass $200 ~ $1000 printers? What the fuck is wrong with you idiotic assholes. Get a damn printer to match your system....... Buy a Epson 9600 wide-format inkjet (or something better). My Epson 9600 44" printer never clogs, it's inkjet cartridges are huge, print quality is near perfect, prints huge posters and on any type of roll paper you can put into it, even some sheet paper can be fed into it. And it's a bargain as far as large format printers go at about $8,000. But hell this is slashdot and we're all fucking idiots that can only run our mouths about consumer level bullshit inkjet printers and try to scotch-tape a problem by bitching about crappy printers unfit for any purpose other than an oversized paperweight and using shutterfly or wal-mart's half-assed low-end print services to kinda fix the problem. If you want to print step up and buy a REAL printer, otherwise shut the fuck up because I'm sick of reading about your shitty desktop printer.

Re:not fair to laser

[EjectButton]

In fact, just behind me and a bit to the left is a Laserjet 5550. This is a five thousand dollar printer, give or take a grand, if you load it up with RAM.
Counting the cost on unspecific addons isn't really fair, if we take the cost of the midrange 5550 model (5550dn, one that has duplexing, but only two paper trays) it is a $3,000 printer http://www.techonweb.com/products/productdetail.as px?id=B27816&src=PG

The cost to replace all the toner? You might be able to get it cheaper elsewhere, but buying HP carts from CDW, which is what we do, costs literally $1300 for a full set. The cost per page is something like 26 cents if you're printing an average sheet with something like 20% coverage. If you intend to use the printer for years then the cost per page is far more relevant than the cost of a set of cartridges, and if you are going to bring up the cost of a set of cartridges you might want to mention that both the laser and an ink printer will come with a set of cartridges, but you will get many times more pages out of the set that comes with the laser.
It also sounds like you are getting ripped off on your toner.
(black cartridge for 5550) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16817102185 $185.40 / 13,000 pages @ 5% coverage $0.01426 /page @ 5% coverage $0.05704 /page @ 20% coverage
(color cartridge for 5550) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16817102177 $257.70 / 12,000 pages @ 5% coverage $0.02148 /page @ 5% coverage $0.08590 /page @ 20% coverage
which is nowhere near $0.26 /page @20% coverage even if if it uses all color and zero black.

Re:A secretive company - seconded and more

[Blowfishie]

I second everything in that post. The interview NDA, the secrecy, the technology - all true. The technology website is: www.memjet.com (link).

I worked at the HP photo printer division

[LS]

and in person I saw flier (flyer?) printers spitting out 1000s of pages a minute. This is not consumer tech, but the way it works is by arranging a diagonal array of several dozen standard photo printer cartridges. The only thing new about this tech is that it's in a small consumer form factor. bleh

Re:I worked at the HP photo printer division

[rab1bits]

Hi, would you happen to know, or anyone else reading this, how I can erase/delete/clear the memory chip in an hp photosmart 3310 all-in-one? The person is concerned with people getting a hold of docs that he scanned into the machine since they stay in the memory. May if anyone knows how i can get to the chip to smash it to bits? That would work fine. thanks!

Re:Extensive experience filling the previous serie

[Anonymous Coward]

Great post, very informative - thank you. You mentioned long urls - try tinyurl when mailing them.

Re:Extensive experience filling the previous serie

[dabraun]

The Canon i860 [canon.com] is not related to the S820. Note that the web page says, "... it provides true 4 color photo printing...". One day a few months ago, the InkJet printer companies switched from "true 6 color photo printing" to the present "true 4 color photo printing". I don't know their motivation, but the 6 color printers print MUCH nicer photos, in our experience, with much better shadow detail. Tech company marketing departments take extreme advantage of any ignorance they find in customers.

This is because the i860 produces better pictures than most of the previous generation's 6-color printers. The technology has changed quickly - I have an i960 (same era as the i860 - circa 2003) - the pictures are so perfect that I have little reason to consider buying a newer one ... unless, say, I could get a four color printer that made prints as good or better than the i860 ... less stuff to keep track of and refill (though I've got no interest in going the HP way with merged cartridges and all the wasted ink they result in.)

As a sidenote, all this complaining about inkjet clogs ... my i960 goes between not printing anything for a month or more and once or twice a year printing massive quantities (making photo calendars for family is one of those times.) I only had it clog once - and that was with a very cheap 3rd party ink - putting back a canon ink cartridge made the clog go away within a few pages. (while no amount of rising the head in hot water etc had any effect.) Oddly enough, only the yellow ink clogged - and I saw the same behavior on two printers ... so, I use canon yellow ink and cheap ink for the rest.