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.

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: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: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: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: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.

Is this new?

[Ed Avis]

Surely this is the old idea of the line printer [wikipedia.org] 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: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.

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 [ims-ink.com], 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 [canon.com] 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 [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.

Testing in the store:

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.

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: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: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

[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

[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: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.