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.

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: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?

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.

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:Ink

[MindStalker]

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

A secretive company

[femto]

Here's an article [smh.com.au] about Silverbrook [silverbrookresearch.com].

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: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: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: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.