Big head - amazing speed
I’m talking about a BIG inkjet print head. Really big—a nozzle array that’s a full 8 inches wide, with 70,400 ink nozzles! This microscope photo shows a tiny section of the print head, and each of the small white circles is a single ink nozzle.
The ink nozzles are arranged in lines, with 1600 nozzles per inch. These can produce more than 2.5 million ink dots per square inch of paper in a single pass. These tiny nozzles can fire out ink droplets smaller than one picoliter. With this size of a printhead, it doesn’t need to move back and forth to make passes like ordinary printheads. Instead, the paper is just transport past the stationary printhead at a speed of one letter-size (A4) page per second, or 60 pages per minute. (The video clips are so amazing, you might at first think this is a hoax, but the folks at Lyra Research assure us that it’s legitimate!)
This new Memjet inkjet printer technology, that analysts believe will revolutionize the imaging industry, was unveiled last month by Silverbrook Research, and published in an article by texyt.com. Silverbrook says some of the Memjet Technology printers should be ready for the consumer market by the end of this year, starting with a 100mm (4-inch wide) printhead that will be used for home and retail photo printing as well as label printing devices. An A4/Letter printhead should be available in 2008.
The Memjet Technology may be licensed to manufacturers such as HP, Canon and others. Silverbrook expects the printers to eventually cost $200 or less. Silverbrook has plans for a $150, desktop photo printer that can print 30 photos per minute. By comparison, a single 4x6 inkjet print takes about 30 seconds to over a minute to print on most current desktop photo inkjet printers.
The only other inkjet printer able to print anywhere close to this speed is HP’s huge new Edgeline printer, but these printers start at $16,000 and can not be purchased (instead, the company will make customers purchase printing services, rather than the product itself).
HP’s Edgeline printer has a full-width nozzle array design similar to the Memjet, but at about one-half to one-third the speed of the Memjet Technology. That’s still about as fast as a laser printer! Right now, the Edgeline technology is only available for HP’s large copy shop type printers, but this may soon become the death of the big office laser printers. The Memjet Technology could soon compete with small office and home lazer printers.
Posted by Royce Bair on 04/20 at 09:24 AM
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