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Printer Hardware

World's Fastest Inkjet Printer? 355

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-didn't-print-that-many-pages-last-year dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Brother Industries has just demonstrated what they say is the world's fastest inkjet printer. The prototype uses a revolutionary new static head array to achieve amazing speeds of around 150 full colour pages per minute."
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World's Fastest Inkjet Printer? More

World's Fastest Inkjet Printer?

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  • time-space tradeoff (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:25AM (#12758086) Homepage
    In terms of engineering this ain't nothing new. You can do multiplication in O(1) space and O(n^2) time or O(1) time and O(n^2) space [well it's actually O(lg N) time ... but who's counting].

    It's a cool idea [can't RTFA cuz of slashdotting] since a lot of home users use inkjet.

    Now all they have todo is make ink cartridges that hold more than 9mL of ink... 9mL does ~300 sheets, a 50mL would be more than enough for a home office then....

    Tom

    • Re:time-space tradeoff (Score:4, Interesting)

      by graphicsguy ( 710710 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:51AM (#12758453)
      It may be possible to set up a continuous ink system . I know, for example, that inksupply.com offers continuous flow ink systems [inksupply.com] that use some tube connections to feed the cartridge directly from bottles of ink. (but they currently only support Epson)
      • http://novajet1000i.encad.com/?s=1332&c=opp04 [encad.com]

        Many of them have extra tanks. The encad linked above has 8 500mL tanks, each tank runs $40 - $120 (yup! $0.08 per mL!). The actual printheads are replacable and look very similar to the old classic HP inkjet cartidge filled with foam and a hose on the top where the refill nib is.

        The cool thing about these systems are that you can keep an extra tank to automatically switch to when one is dry, or you can switch easily between different inks for different
    • "Now all they have todo is make ink cartridges that hold more than 9mL of ink"

      And maybe a way to prevent the ink drying out forcing you to replace the cartridge after a certain length of time even if you haven't used it. I have a B&W HP LaserJet 1100. I haven't replaced the toner and drum since I bought it Feb 2000 (lightly used obviously). I'm pretty sure I've almost reached the limit on the number of sheets of paper it can print... but that's five years of value. The only thing I ever want to pr
    • In terms of engineering this ain't nothing new. You can do multiplication in O(1) space and O(n^2) time or O(1) time and O(n^2) space [well it's actually O(lg N) time ... but who's counting].

      What? How is this in any way relevant to making printers? Or are you really arguing that we can in general do anything arbitrarily fast with a trade-off in another area?

      • Generally I would say you can do pretty much anything in O(1) time given sufficient other resources.

        Consider the task of optimal path finding in a graph -- you can do that in O(1) for any journey if you have precomputed the optimal path for all possible pairs of nodes in advance. Of course this costs a lot of space and a lot of preparation time.

        Factoring 1024-bit RSA keys? Prepare a table mapping all possible 1024 bit numbers to their factors and use a simple array lookup - O(1).

        The problem is that thi

    • Re:time-space tradeoff (Score:2, Informative)

      by BluEyeZ ( 464959 )
      For those of you just juicing for a pic, you can see it at Engadget [engadget.com]

      D

  • Drivers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dorf on Perl ( 738169 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:27AM (#12758106)
    Does it have a Linux driver? Yeah, Canon, I'm looking at you.

  • And yet... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by theGreater ( 596196 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:27AM (#12758109) Homepage

    ...to prove how insanely great the print quality is on this thing, the author of said article provides a very lossy jpeg scan [redferret.net] as evidence. Having said that, if they can get 600x600 at > 100 PPM, I'm all in.

    -theGreater.

  • Very bad in a printing accident. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:27AM (#12758111)
    Speeds like that can be disasterous during a printing accident. Recently in the office a young secretary accidentally printed out (on one of our 75 pages/min printers) numerous copies of a document around 400 pages in length. Thankfully it was just black-and-white text, rather than colorful images.

    In any case, it took her a full two minute to realize her mistake, and another four or five minutes to figure out how to stop the print job. By that time she had printed off about 500 worthless pages.

    When it comes to these machines, printing mistakes can be costly and difficult to deal with. It's unfortuante that many of these printers can hold 5000+ pages of paper. While convenient, it is just screaming for disaster!
    • Just think of what would happen if the thing overheated. You'd have sheets of charcoal coming out of the printer faster than you can stuff them in the trash.

      I quake at the possibilities for buffer overruns....
    • Yeah. I heard that cars which go more than 5 mph may be bad when people accidently crash into each other. I think all cars with a max speed of more than 5 mph should be taken off the road since people have accidents.

      -----
      WrongPlanet.net [wrongplanet.net]
      • "Yeah. I heard that cars which go more than 5 mph may be bad when people accidently crash into each other. I think all cars with a max speed of more than 5 mph should be taken off the road since people have accidents."

        I once went the wrong way and didn't realize it for 20 miles. If my gas tank had only been, say, 23 ounces instead of 23 gallons I would have ran out of gas after about 3 miles, then I might have realized my mistake earlier and not wasted allllllll that gasoline.

        They really need to fix t

    • Yeah, but it's just paper and ink. It's not like you're accidentally engaging in friendly fire [wikipedia.org]...

      Eric
    • Is the airbus A380 a bad plane because an operator mistake would kill more people?

    • Re:Very bad in a printing accident. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Paradise Pete ( 33184 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @12:00PM (#12758572) Journal
      While convenient, it is just screaming for disaster!

      For sufficiently small values of "disaster."

      disaster |di.zast.r| noun
      1. a sudden event, such as an accident or a natural catastrophe, that causes great damage or loss of life.
      2. Accidentally printing off a bunch of pages.

    • it doesn't help that on Word 97 (which is still probably in the majority in most offices), the print icon is right next to the save icon... a disaster waiting to happen...

      I know... I missed once and had a 500 page document print out and spool to the very fast network printer before I knew what the f had happened... the cancel button wasn't available for very long... and I'd already gotten up to go for a pee...

      I now make a point of removing the print icon from all toolbars I come across if it's next to the

    • That sorts of accidents are happening because someone disabled Clippy, else something like what follows would have happened :

      It seems you are trying to print. Are you sure ?
      It seems you want to print a document lenghtier than 10 pages. Are you sure ?
      It seems you want to print more that five copies of it. Are you sure ?
      I'm going to print 4000 pages now. Is that OK ?
      Aren't you just keeping to click on the 'Yes' button ?
    • In any case, it took her a full two minute to realize her mistake, and another four or five minutes to figure out how to stop the print job. By that time she had printed off about 500 worthless pages.

      Instead of stopping the print job, she should have first stopped the printer, either by turning its power switch off, or pulling the plug. Or, remove the paper tray.

      Then, without paper spewing out, she could take her time figuring out how to convince the computer not to resume printing that job when the p

    • That's a very archaic way of thinking. If printers didn't hold over 5000 pages, then people would never print what they wanted to print, and people would never use them. It's all about supply, demand, and market forces, my good man.
    • Since when is $250 a disaster? (I'm assuming $.05/page which is probably a bit high for a b&w high volume printer.) A business disaster is sending out 1,400 incorrect demo packs weighing a couple pounds a piece because your DBA f'd up the recipient database. Sure you don't want it to happen all the time, but if someone prints an extra couple hundred pages it's not going to sink a business which can afford the printer in the first place. Heck think of all the laptops that end up full of coffee, you can b

  • Info Sheet (Score:5, Informative)

    by LoneIguana ( 681297 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:31AM (#12758171)
    Spec Sheet from Brother: http://www.brother.com/brother_En/e-topics/inkjet/ inkjet.pdf [brother.com]

  • Non-moving print heads... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DigitalRaptor ( 815681 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:32AM (#12758183)
    Now if the hard drive industry would just put some thought into non-moving heads...

    I've thought for years that a series of heads side by side, with code and logic to read sequentially or simultaneously would drastically improve hard drive performance, while reducing hardware failures.

    Almost every time I have a hard drive die it's because of failed heads. Since using UPS's I haven't had a single fried board.

    • Re:Non-moving print heads... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by darkjedi521 ( 744526 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:41AM (#12758311)
      I believe its been tried before. Do a google search on "drum memory". Was slow, even for its day.

      • I believe its been tried before. Do a google search on "drum memory". Was slow, even for its day.

        It was only slow because they didn't know what we do now about how to fabricate electronics. They were using clunky wound-core magnetic pickups, which suffer from impedance problems: you can only make a magnetic field of a given size and strength expand and collapse so fast.

        With modern fabrication and magneto-resistive heads, it should be possible to make head arrays of (say) 32 tracks, which read 32

        • I know someone who worked at Stratus (high availability servers) on a project for state lotteries.

          They tested hard drives with 2 seperate servo arms + heads, thinking that if one head goes bad then they park it. The other advantage, was the increased write speed.

          In the end however, it was determined that RAID was just as reliable for the same cost and didn't require custom manufacturing.

          -Pan
    • It's a good idea; I wonder if it's possible. The head moves with exquisite precision to pick up the hundreds of separate tracks. Instead, you'd need hundreds of separate heads, powerful enough to read the data and isolated enough not to interfere with each other.

      I'm sure that there are tricks to make it happen. Say, 8 separate arms so that each one contains only 1/8 the number of heads, possibly spacing them out far enough to make it happen. I believe high-end hard drives already have multiple arms.

      Redund
      • Even putting multiple heads on the arm. Four heads, for example, mean that data is never mour than one fourth of the way away.

        hawk
        • The problem is inter-head calibration. Each stepper-motor/head complex has to behave exactly like all the others, even though there's resonant coupling among the various read/write heads.

          I'm not sure that it's an intractable problem, but I sure wouldn't want to be the one who got stuck trying to figure out how to fix it...
    • You mean like this [wikipedia.org]?
    • It would probably be easier to deal with solid state hard drives. Whether or not they are more reliable for heavy writes, I don't know, I thought hard drives could sustain several orders of magnitude more writes per sector than flash memory.
    • Sorry, but i call bullshit.

      Do you know just how many tracks a disk has? Hint: its many many thousand. You cant put so many heads over the disc because the head is orders of magnitudes wider than the track. Plus if you were only doing sparse head placement (like 100 heads evenly spaced), you could not keep them calibrated, plus even IF you could, seek times would get MUCH worse because of resonanz modes of the arm complex, increased inertia, ect.
      Add to this the problems of sticktion, disturbance of the bern
      • Could I please have your name, so that I might know what to engrave on the plaque at the bottom of the statue I erected in your honor?

      • You cant put so many heads over the disc because the head is orders of magnitudes wider than the track.

        Current heads are bigger because they have to move around. The actual functional part of the head is by definition exactly the width of one track. And width along the disk radius is the only dimension that really matters. Height along the spindle axis and length along the track arc are bounded, but of less concern.

        you could not keep them calibrated, plus even IF you could, seek times would g

      • You know, the harddisc industry (in fact any industry with x000 employees ) HAS people that are WAY smarter than you. So whenever you encouter something that doesnt make sense to you, maybe YOU are wrong.

        If everyone thought this way, true "out-side-the-box" innovation would never happen. It starts with a single person saying "Hmm... I wonder what would happen if we did it this way instead". Granted, the EE's employed by HDD companies are more likely to get that stroke inspiration, but it's not impossib

    • It wouldn't need to be non-moving, you just need 3 heads per arm. That way, you can simultaneously be reading data, reading metadata and moving the third arm to where you need to read next. That way, you'd pretty much eliminate seek time for all but the initial sector.

      You can extend this further and have multiple arms per platter, such that at the innermost track your read-heads would be as close as possible without having overlapping read areas. (Or, if you had one known blank spot on the disk, you could

    • I've thought for years that a series of heads side by side, with code and logic to read sequentially or simultaneously would drastically improve hard drive performance, while reducing hardware failures.

      Well the old multi-platters could do that. But I can just imagine the top of a hard drive case packed with read heads end to end.

      I think the problem is that head positioning is too precise of a problem to rely on static load bearing structures. It has to be a dynamic process.

      That said I have often imagi
    • "Now if the hard drive industry would just put some thought into non-moving heads..."

      Kenwood made a 72x CD-ROM drive with multiple heads [cdrinfo.com] a few years back. Also allowed the CDs to spin much slower while still achieving high speeds, making the drive much quieter. From what I remember it was a great drive according to reviews, guess it was just cheaper to put one head in than several and spin the disc faster.

    • Well, if you've ever taken apart a hard drive you'd know that the physical drive head is MUCH wider than the magnetic stripe of data. I don't know exactly but I suspect given hd capacities and the size of even the tiniest print head that the magnetic stripe is hundreds or thousands of times narrower than the drive head. Only a small piece of the tiny, tiny, itty bitty part that touches the drive actually reads the data.

      Even then you're still spinning the drive platters.

      You got any idea how to fit 50,000
    • Back in the day, around 1980 at DEC, we had a big PDP-11/70 that was set up to use fixed-head disks for swapping. I think they were called RS04s ? 1 or 2 MB each is all they held, which was small compared to the 40 to 80 MB removable disks it used for storage, but big compared to the amount of ram available which was something under half a MB.

  • As seen on TV (Score:4, Funny)

    by GeekDork ( 194851 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:33AM (#12758197)

    At long last, technology catches up with those really cool printers and fax machines in the movies! We'll be able to print suspect photos in less than a second! Yay!

  • Not new (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Solder Fumes ( 797270 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:33AM (#12758198)
    The company I used to work for does high-speed printing. They developed their own inkjet array drum, looked like one of those radial aircraft piston engines. We're talking over 400 feet per minute, continuous...
  • Now, are those 150 pages per minute actually legible, or are they just covered with random splotches of color?

  • Oh my god. (Score:5, Funny)

    by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 ) <john.oyler@ c o m c a st.net> on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:37AM (#12758239) Journal
    They've just discovered the holy grail of inkjet industry revenue.

    That's like 5 color cartridges per minute, at $32 a pop!

  • 150 A6 Pages (Score:5, Informative)

    by borawjm ( 747876 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:38AM (#12758257)
    TFA states that it prints 150 A6 pages per minutes. A6 pages are only 4.13in x 5.83in. Alot smaller than USA's standard 8 1/2in x 11in paper size.
    • Another way to think of it is that the standard 8.5" by 11" paper is similar to A4. A5 is A4 cut in half, and A6 is A5 cut in half, so what we're talking about is actually 150 quarter-pages per minute, or about 37.5 [normal] pages per minute.

      • Re:150 A6 Pages (Score:2, Informative)

        by orderb13 ( 792382 )
        And if you had read TFA it stated that it would work for any size paper, all you have to do is keep adding heads. So to get from A6 to A4 you'd just need to have 4 heads instead of one.
        • Actually, if you read TF spec sheet, you'd see that doesn't work -- you can only put them side-by-side, resulting in 75 ppm. Still freeking fast, but not, by any means, 150 ppm.
  • I suppose it uses standard ink cartridges / print heads in a gatling style configuration. And since you'll be able to spew out ink at up to $85/minute, they're just going give these away. Especially to schools.

  • From the article (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Redwin ( 805980 )
    "So apparently the secret lies in the use of new Piezo Inkjet Line Head technology, which prints at 600×600 dpi, but doesn't actually move at all. The ink is transferred at high speed as the paper passes underneath the static nozzles. In order to get the throughput, the printer contains a separate head for each colour, so that the paper receives all the ink in one high speed sweep"

    Sounds impressive, although I wonder how it copes with wet ink on the pages. If they really are coming through at 150ppm t

  • Who ordered this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:42AM (#12758320)
    And the purpose of an inkjet printer that uses paper and ink this fast, when there are now color laser printers that produce better output at a lower cost per page, and likely cost less, is what? Who wants this except the over priced Ink sellers (Inkjet ink costs more than Dom Perignon or other expensive champaign, ounce for ounce)? And I have enough problems replacing clogged and spotty inkjet nozzels when I have a small number of nozzels (that therefor get enough use to usually keep them flowing, how hard is it going to be to maintain good quality output for a device with 2656 nozzels per color (that seems like low resolution for a full page head too).
    • Don't worry! Just buy the ink...

      Sure, ink seems expensive now, but in 5 years time there will be a class action lawsuit and everyone that has been locked into buying overpriced ink will be entitled to a $3 rebate.

      So it's not as bad as you make out! ;)
  • So, at a zillion pages-per-minute, the ink cartriges should last, oh, 5 minutes or so?

  • Printers we would like to see (Score:3, Interesting)

    by British ( 51765 ) <british1500@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:46AM (#12758381) Homepage Journal
    Yes, speed is great, but I honestly don't find myself holding my breath for a printout from mapquest,etc.

    How about:

    1. A super-cheap to refill DIY printer. Sure, it goes against the whole business model of printers & ink. Then find some way to have it not dry out after periods of non-use.

    2. A reasonably priced printer that prints on both sides of the paper.

    3. Bullet-proof linux drivers. I gave up on CUPS + HP printer when it would print out 90% of the page, and then several pages of garbage, thus wasting paper.

    4. an ez-un-jamming printer. When a paper doesn't go in 100% perfectly straight, hilarity ensues trying to pull the confetti out without damaging things.

    Or maybe I should just save up some $$$ and go strictly laserjet instead of mooching from work.
    • 2. A reasonably priced printer that prints on both sides of the paper.

      HP has a number of reasonably priced printers which can do this. The Photosmart 7755 at around a hundred bucks use have an optional attachment (~30 if memory serves) to do two sided. The Business Inkjet 1200d at around 200 bucks includes the functionality out of the box. They have had this for quite some time. Several years ago I was working as a retail whore selling computer stuff, and I sold a lot of cheap inkjets with double side
    • 2. A reasonably priced printer that prints on both sides of the paper.

      yeah, the canon Pixma IP3000 prints on both sides and it cost me about $30. Does great photos too.. the linux drivers aren't there yet though.

      • I was just about to suggest that same printer. I got mine for arouind $43 tho (including $20 rebate). Even for twice what I paid, it would still be a great printer. (unlike my HP officejet, which isn't even worth half of what I paid, I'm never buying one of those again)

        The photos look fantastic, and it's even pretty cheap to buy ink for, with separate color carts. (they're clear to so you can actually see when the ink is really gone) Plus according some review I read, it's pretty stingy on ink compare

  • How are they going to dry those pages? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cplusplus ( 782679 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:49AM (#12758421) Journal
    Okay, 150ppm for A6. How wet are those pages? And A6 is a very small piece of paper (about 1/4 the surface area of 8.5x11). My guess is that if you wanted a somewhat dry, smear proof 8.5x11 piece of paper, the speed of that Brother printer would be at most 30-40ppm (which is still fast for ink!).
    • My guess is that if you wanted a somewhat dry, smear proof 8.5x11 piece of paper, the speed of that Brother printer would be at most 30-40ppm (which is still fast for ink!).

      They could have multiple output trays and cycle between them. With three trays you could have a net speed of 50 ppm to each tray. An absolutely ugly hack, yes, but it's a possibility.

      Or they could be using an ink that just dries quickly. The father of one of my good friends was one of the progenitors of inkjet printing, and he says

  • At those speeds, I shudder to think how fast you can burn through ink.

    I suppose you can find the people/businesses with these printers by the 6 large water towers converted into ink tanks out back....

  • Static heads? How quaint (Score:5, Funny)

    by red_dragon ( 1761 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:51AM (#12758458) Homepage

    Stationary print heads... that seems so much like the old-as-balls HP line printers that we have here that I'm wondering if they're going to have it print on fanfold greenbar paper. Maybe they'll rediscover batch processing too.

  • Can the connection to the printer keep up? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by csimpkin ( 808625 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @11:54AM (#12758501)
    I wonder if the connection (I assume usb 2.0) can handle 150 full color photos in a minute. The article indicated that the demo printed 150 copies of the same photo. So, it only had to send one photo to the printer. I could see printing photo albums with this, but that is a lot of data to send to the printer.
  • A "sheet" in this case [brother.com] is an A6 sheet, which is 1/4 the area of a letter-sized piece of paper. It's roughly the size of a 4x6 photo: a little under 4.2" x 5.9" (105mm x 148mm).
  • At that rate, anyone could open up a small printing-press, producing about 10,000 copies of a 150 page book in a week or so...

    --
    http://unk1911.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

  • So they reinvented the dot-matrix line printer.

    Maybe it's new for ink jet, but it isn't new for printing. Line printers were pretty standard for high-speed but low-quality printing up until about 15 years ago; the economical laser printer killed them off.

    The dot-matrix line printers would have a solid row of pins across the ribbon, and would form a complete row at a time. The fixed-font printers had a solid row of character hammers and a chain with the letter-forms on it. The chain was set up so t

  • Printer pranks with fast printers. (Score:5, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @12:04PM (#12758598)
    Printers like this are just asking for company pranksters to screw around! In our company, there is this "resident nerd" (I'm the resident "geek"--I suppose there is a difference) who does all kinds of computer pranks. Most are a lot of the usual ones, like taking a screenshot of Windows saying you performed an illegal operation, and then setting that as the wallpaper... But a few were truly original and imaginative. Once, right around the time Windows 95 was coming out and most people still used DOS, he coded up a fake DOS command line interpreter. It looked like the usual DOS screen, black, with a "C:\>"... Any command you typed would return a "Bad command or file name." You type DIR and it says "Bad command or file name." It was in the autoexec file, so if you rebooted, that didn't help. Those kinds of pranks, simple but effective.

    I'm mentioning this in a post about fast printers because a year or two ago, he devised a program that sent tons and tons of empty pages to the printer at high speed, as quickly as possible, so that people won't know what's going on. As luck would have it, he owned a laser printer identical to the office printer. He disassembled his own printer and disconnected the power switch so it would be "always on", and he installed a battery in some empty space inside that would allow it to keep running for a minute or two if unplugged, he installed a hidden screw that held the paper tray inside so you couldn't pull it out to "save the paper" (it's stuck!), and somehow he had it so when you try to print a legitimate file, it would just start spitting out the "blank" pages, without printing anything on them. The day before, he collected tons of "scratch" paper that had all kinds of meaningless junk printed on it, and placed it inside the paper tray. He made "the switch", putting his own printer in place of the office one. In the morning, the secretary tried to print something, and from her perception, it appeared that all the data got screwed up on the way to the printer. Random ascii characters were spewing out at high speed. Little did she know it was pre-printed. She tried to pull out the paper tray and when she realized it was stuck, she clicked "cancel printing" and when that didn't work, she turned off the power switch to the printer, and when that didn't work, she turned off the whole UPS that the computer and printer were plugged in to, and when that didn't work (she thought the UPS battery was still powering it), she unplugged the printer from the UPS... She had messed up the whole desk in a matter of minutes, and the printer kept spewing things out! She truly freaked out! But the best part was when the nerd admitted it was a prank... She actually smacked him! It was funny.

  • Looks like HP is losing its reputation as the printer technology leader.

  • Fast and cheap inkjet printers. With extreamly overpriced ink. Fine the inkjet is faster now. But what it the cost per print? How does it compare with Laser or Solid Ink. Unfortunatly the reason why people spend the extra money on lasers and solid ink is because they print rather fast, so now people will see $100 Inkjet printers that print at the speed of a laser and jump right on them. And after every 3 minutes of printing you need a $30 cartridge of ink. Laser and Solid Ink offer far more pages per d
  • I would say they'd also need a faster-drying ink, no? Or perhaps a heater on the output or something. I know whenever I print it takes a hell of a lot longer than half of a second for the ink to dry.
  • http://redferret.net.nyud.net:8090/?p=5291 [nyud.net]

    I wonder why the story links don't use it BY DEFAULT? Just add .nyud.net:8090 after the domain name. Is that too hard?
  • There have been xerographic printers with speeds like this for many years. A Xerox DocuColor is faster. But this is a smaller technology.

    Brother's press press release [brother.com] shows what they're doing. The slow version still has a moving print head, but they hope to reach the point where there's one big print head covering the entire width of the paper. That eliminates the scanning mechanism and makes large ink tanks possible, since the ink tanks don't have to move.

    Nothing yet from Brother on how much the pri

  • It was on "Tomorrow's World" which tells our British listeners how long ago I'm talking. The demonstration was of *huge* print jobs though, A2, A1 and A0 sort of size.
  • I think for most of us, it's more important for the manufacturors to come up with an ink formula that doesn't dry out and clugging the print head than any minute per page speed improvement. Print head clugging is probably (in my own experience) the single most frustrating problem with inkjet. Of course, this might cut into manufacturors' profit derived from ink cartridges...

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