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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.
With the cost of ink these days, one might as well use it to print sheets of money...
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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!
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 !).
-- Rastignac was here.
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.
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.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
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.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
So no more banding?
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.
I could swear I've heard this approach mentioned before. Is anyone else getting a sense of deja vu?
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.
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?
... 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...
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.
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?
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
"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.
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?
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.
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."
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'.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
Pining for the fjords
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.
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=
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:
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?
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
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.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
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?
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
As a sidenote, all this complaining about inkjet clogs