Newer, faster, cheaper print technology is almost here....

[Manuchau]

Well, things may be getting better soon for us printaholics, and relief is on the way. Recharger Magazine, a technical mag for the printer industry, has just put out a press release about the Silverbrook Memjet technology. Here is an excerpt.

"The new technology prints full color images at 60 pages per minute (ppm), many times
the inkjet industry standard. The technology, which will be a fraction of the price of high-
speed color laser devices, will soon be available for OEMs targeting the home/office,
photo-kiosk and label markets"

Tech types can read the whole article here...looks interesting!!

http://www.rechargermag.com/articles/46356/

Comments???

 

[Grandad35]

Here is another link - click on any of the several video links:
http://www.memjet.com/media.aspx#

This seems to be real, but it doesn't look like something for the casual user.

They claim to have 6400 nozzles for each 20 mm in width, and one video shows 5 banks of nozzles (4 colors + pigment black?) - this works out to 1625 nozzles of each color per inch (Canon's native input is 600 pixels/inch). One concern would be what happens when a few nozzles are plugged. They claim to sense this and to automatically add extra ink in the nozzles adjacent to the plugged nozzles, but how would a high resolution photo look when this was done? My i9900 overlays 8 scans when printing photos so that a plugged nozzle still has 7 other nozzles printing on the same area - this printer doesn't have this feature.

The ink is obviously laid down many times faster than with conventional inkjet printers - how do they prevent "pooling" of the ink on the paper? Does this printer require special paper to absorb the ink this rapidly? The photo printer appears to be sheet fed, but the label and document printers appear to be roll fed..

This is still an inkjet printer, and there is always the concern about "what will the ink cost". The printer itself may cost less than a color laser printer, but what will the prints cost?

I'm sure that these people have throught this through and that they have solid technical answers to any issues that we might raise. A lot of the discussion will probably boil down to the cost of their paper and ink.

 

[Manuchau]

They claim the new technology will increase speed and quality, while dramatically reducing costs, and it will also be for the home user since there will be a number of inexpensive models. However, time will tell, and we will see if this is indeed a breakthrough technology or more hype.

Print quality and longevity are factors as well, of course, and it will be intersting to see Wilhelm Imaging's research data on these, supposedly coming in September.

If this DOES work well, AND reduce costs substantially, I would think that the other Inkjet manufacturers will have to adjust somehow and lower the cost of printing overall. We should all keep our fingers crossed.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Having a printhead as wide as the page sounds like an excellent idea, as long as all the nozzles continue to work, as Grandad35 pointed out, or as long as their compensation scheme works, but can you image the cost of replacing this print head? I'm sure it would cost less to just buy another printer.

However, there is another point to consider. If I feed an image taken by my 7.1 megapixel camera to this printer, it will actually have to transfer four times that many bytes (because of the four colors) in two seconds, or else it will have to handle jpegs directly. An image of this size printed on 8x10 paper is actually only 300 pixels per inch.

If Memjet could produce a printer that had very cheap ink and could work directly with jpegs and could hook up directly to your camera through its USB connection so that as quickly as it could download the pictures, it could also print them, then they would have a hot item. But there would still be complications: what if I didn't want to print all the images in my camera, but just the new ones. Would it be smart enough to do that?

 

[WhiteDog]

I have read the memjet press release. After many years in the technology development business, and reading between the lines, my opinion is that this product is some way from the market, probably a couple of years or more. Bear in mind that we are very unlikely to see 13" or larger versions of this item, since the head is effectively a bar without a moving carriage. It will be made in the 8.5" size and that will be it. The market for wide format will not be enticing enough, and the cost of the unit would ramp up significantly. The same combination of economics and technology affects the Xerox Phaser units.