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.

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?

[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.

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 !).

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.