New Inkjet Technology 5 To 10 Times Faster 291
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.
Ink (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ink (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ink (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ink (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ink (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ink (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to print some pictures, just upload them to wal-mart or something. I don't know about everyone else, but pictures are not something I print a lot of, and many things I do print would quickly exhaust ink cartridges. And as the parent stated: clogged cartridges suck. Who as a home user uses their printer frequently enough to keep that from happening? This is not a problem with laserjet toner.
Re:Ink (Score:5, Funny)
Game over, SCHecklerX wins the thread.
Seriously, why are we even having these conversations any more? Ooh, a new way to clog up your ink cartridges! Mod me troll if you want, but why we're still debating (heh! not even, it's DEAD!) the pros and cons of inkjet technology is beyond me.
To recap: You want to print a little? Spend the money on an LJ, becuase an underused IJ clogs up.
You want to print a lot? Spend the money on an LJ, because it's more cost-effective.
Want to print pictures? Go to Wal-mart like the man said.
Come on folks, do yourselves a favour: take your inkjets out to a field somewhere, crank the Rap tunes up to 11 and have at 'em with a baseball bats. You know you want to.
Re:Ink (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problem with that statement; 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.
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.
If you get a Canon inkjet with a continuous inker and just buy ink refills, then you can probably beat that quite handily. And you can probably get the printer for under $300 for the whole schmeer. Problem is, it's slow as hell compared to the big fat laser. But if you had an inkjet with a full-width head, you could solve that problem, too. And in the bargain you'd get rid of the high-powered electronics, the carcinogenic toner and fumes (which they very much are, especially from colored toners) and the gigantic printer.
The head clogging is a problem. Unless they have that solved, this printer is a non-starter. But I don't think it's an insoluble problem. In fact, maybe the answer is a cleaning solution (nyuk nyuk) and an embedded ultrasonic transducer. Recycled inkjet cartridge nozzles are cleaned with some kind of detergent or something, I don't even know what, but they're done with an ultrasonic washer to break up the bits of ink without touching the nozzles, which are of course very very small.
Re:Ink (Score:4, Informative)
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We bought a Color LaserJet 3800dn for the office a while back. It's
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Re:Ink (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing that a q-tip and a little alcohol can't fix.
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Doesn't bother my cartridges all that much. They have a limited lifespan anyway. Maybe you're using the wrong kind of swabs...
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Re:Ink (Score:4, Funny)
Does it get you really fucked up though? Not that I'm interested or anything...
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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
Extensive experience filling the previous series.. (Score:5, Informative)
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:
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Thi
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This is pretty reasonable, and actually is onpar with many lasers. This is slightly cheaper than US model Canons which used the BCI-3e pigmented black cartridge and the HPs
Another breakthrough (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Another breakthrough (Score:5, Informative)
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Could it be? An inkjet company that figured out why I avoid inkjet printers? Sounds pretty sweet.
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That is what I tried to imply. But with my communications skills being so great, I tried to speak with a tongue in cheek and ended up mangling the tongue. Well, par for the course for me.
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[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]
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Re:Another breakthrough (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe when a lucky Texan strikes black, yellow, cyan, and magenta gold ink prices will plummet, but until then..
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Haven't you heard of ink wells? No? I guess they haven't been popular for a while, but in my day we saw lots more of them than the new fangled oil wells. Smaller and quieter too.
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That sounds extremely cynical. Are you suggesting that being "ripped off" by paying $1.50 -> $3.50 perl ml is somehow better, or that people should just stop printing things to avoid getting screwed? You think gasoline is a better deal than ink? Try using it to print a photo(now THAT would be cool).
The whole point is the cost savings vs. competing products, not some philosophical discussion about what the cost of ink should be
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Here's one reason to believe it's wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Here's one reason to believe it's wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortunately for Silverbrook, it sounds like they have several patents on their technology. HP won't be able to sink Memjet by cloning this printer, because HP would have to pay them royalties for each clone sold. Silverbrook could even prevent HP from copying it altogether if they desired.
But this is all assuming that Silverbrook actually wants to sell these things itself. If their core business is indeed licensing patents, then it's possible that they just wanted to come up with a prototype to scare the pants off of the big inkjet manufacturers. Make a nice press release with a cool video, and stir up coverage with promises of inexpensive ink, and soon HP, Epson, Canon, and all the others will be knocking at the door, asking how they can license this for their own use.
If Silverbrook genuinely wants to sell us cheap Memjet ink, then HP won't be able to stop them. But it's entirely possible that they would prefer to license Memjet to would-be competitors, in which case your prediction comes true; everyone carries on as before.
Videos real? (Score:5, Insightful)
If, on the other hand, they are real, then it's impressive how unreal the technology looks!
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Re:Videos real? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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No, actually (Score:2)
Dead nozzles ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 !).
Compartmentalize (Score:4, Insightful)
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at the very least ti would have to be user replaceable for this to work.
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Indeed. I'm sure they've thought through 99.9% of the problems the experts on this board are suggesting. The company is just NOT going to develop and announce a new product/technology without massive amounts of testing and de-bugging, and they're sure as hell not going to just forget about all of the KNOWN problems with current ink-jet products.
This isn't a piece of software folks.
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Never mind that if the nozzle array is more than one deep (Or maybe 4 deep, for CMYK) then you still won't see a big vertical line.
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They show an image of the print head a bit further down the page. There are THOUSANDS of nozzles, in very deep rows, set into 1 inch square sections. So even if you got all those nozzles clogged enough to create a white line, you would just replace that little section and done.
The guys that made this are very smart. I'm sure they thought the whole "clogging" problem through.
70,400 nozzles = 70,400 clogs (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'd say that my inkjets have more than 10x the paper jamming incidents as my lasers, despite my lasers being used more, and one laser is a duplex printer, which is another avenue for paper jamming, but it rarely happens on them.
Another complaint of mine is the cost of the ink. I think my lasers get over 10x more pages per dollar than inkjets.
As such, I'd much rather buy a la
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I'd say that my inkjets have more than 10x the paper jamming incidents as my lasers, despite my lasers being used more
Actually, I wouldn't say "despite" there, I would say "because" instead.
I've noticed that the lack of use--not heavy use--is precisely what causes the most problems with ink jets (and perhaps all printers, although to a much lesser extent). Ink clogs seem to tend to form whenever ink is not routinely flowing through the nozzles. Even the ink jet printers that (annoyingly so) perform self-cleaning cycles every day seem somewhat less prone to clogs than those that don't. The biggest factor by far in my
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What you say!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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O RLY?
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quality (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a wise move, from one with experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Looks like OKI (Score:3, Interesting)
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,
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Unfortunately, HP discontinued it quite quickly and the machine does have a couple of quirks. But in general it has been a great printer.
Long AND Wide (Score:2)
Then they can get really fancy, micropositioning the "print face" at subdot distances for even higher resolution...
Meanwhile, I'd like to use the printface with a video sensor for registration against the "last pass" for grafitti. Color, hi-res grafitti. Bombing by remote-control micro-helicopter...
The inevitable future of all new media (Score:2)
It's a glorified press release with a video (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Whats old (Score:2)
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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...
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90% of all modern lasers are still rastering with lasers. Thats why they are called "laser" printers.
There are a few manufactorers of LED printers (Not "LED-Lasers", thats like saying "a gasoline diesel engine"). Oki comes to mind, as they are solely doing led prints.
And the difference there isnt really compareable, as both techniques dont feature any lateral movement on the paper... its done via rotating mirrors and a refocus lens.
drying time? (Score:2, Interesting)
3D Printing (Score:2)
I'd love to see this move to the 3D (Z Corp [zcorp.com]) printers for a very fast print cycle.
I also like this technology over color laserjet printers for FPO (first page out) speed. Cost will have to be another factor, hopefully it will be much cheaper than laser color toner.
Lest we forget the pleasure of owning inkjet. (Score:2, Funny)
"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.
Really skeptical at best... (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
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1) The company was formed at the early cusp of when businesses and lawyers started to realize that patents are the new way to do business. Not releasing a product for nearly 10 years is not surprising either. It is easy to get investors to float the company for that long, especially for a disruptive technology that this promises to be
2) Just a general statement about those entrenched or established in a market. Why would HP, whose major revenue comes from printers, e
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Their building on google maps [google.com]
I've never been able to figure out where they keep all their people. They claim to have hundreds of technical employees. The people I know say they work in Balmain. I gather they are spread across multiple terrace houses (the dominant type of building in the area), yet that seems like an awful lot of people to cram in and terrace houses hardly seem suited to housing labs. Maybe they have a significant lab elsewhere, or contract such work out? Anyone know?
I think it is
Re:Really skeptical at best... (Score:4, Interesting)
I am actually stunned that for this particular subject Digg's discussion (which is "like", usually "amazingly" worse in quality than
"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.
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Is this new? (Score:4, Informative)
Not new...and perhaps a maintenance nightmare (Score:4, Interesting)
A secretive company (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Indigo exists and isn't cheap (Score:2)
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Hard to believe that a company without the resources of HP or Xeros can do this, but it'd be neat if they can.
70,400 holes to clog (Score:2)
70,400 holes sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. If one gets clogged... well, you can waste a few litres of ink running cleaning cycles to fix it.
In the end, I g
Memo to self (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds nice but I'll believe it when I see it. How about a print sample blowup?
Reminds me of the old days (Score:2)
* For you yung'uns, a band printer had a rotating metal band stamped with characters. It spun about as fast as a band saw. It had an ink ribbon
Possible Solution to the Inkjet Nozzle Issue (Score:2)
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Sweet (Score:4, Insightful)
The net result is that North America is actually getting greener. 0.12% annually through the 90s and 0.05% annually since 2000.
=Smidge=
Re:Sweet (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Deja vu? (Score:4, Funny)
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I could swear I've heard this approach mentioned before. Is anyone else getting a sense of deja vu?
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You beat me to it.
I remember these as Band Printers. Very fast, very noisy, and the machine was around three times the width of the paper.
I briefly worked with IBM Chain printers in the mid eighties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_printer
Beef.
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Also, I expect the toner will outlast the ink (as in color fading), but I haven't really checked into that.
In response to the gp poster, last I checked LaserJets were
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There are photoservices which will outdo an inkjet, but they are actually few and far between. Inkjet on the right paper does a superb job.
Also, I expect the toner w
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The only think inkjets are still good for are printing on CDs.
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HP Business Inkjets for one, some Epson lines too.