World’s fastest inkjet printer – three pages a second!

Brother Industries is demonstrating the world’s fastest inkjet printer at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan –a prototype designed to demonstrate on-demand printing capabilities. The new technology is a variation on inkjet technology that reorients the printhead with the paper and removes the need for it to move laterally, making the process more efficient , much smaller and blazingly fast – at a journalist demonstration last week the printer produced around 170 pages per minute. Brother sees the technology being used in on-demand printing – as the world goes completely electronic, this type of technology will enable personalised printed newspapers e.g. your hotel might have such a machine hooked to a system that can have your local newspaper from Bogota printed and delivered to your room overnight when you’re at the conference in New Orleans. The paper would be printed according to your interests in a personal profile and combine, for example, the main news and the full local finance, business and sports section but not the womens, real estate, home improvement ad infinitum sections.

On-demand printing is seen as one of the primary uses of the new line printing technology but we see an enormous array of indurtial printing applications plus the potential, due to its small size, for a range of portable applications too.

You can see one such application at the EXPO 2005 Pavilion "Mountain of Dreams" where Brother is demonstrating the performance of the prototype full-colour Line Head Inkjet printer to provide visitors with commemorative photos taken on the spot and printed instantly on A6-size paper at a speed of 150 sheets per minute. Visitors can take these photos home with them.

Brother will explore a variety of approaches to expand the market for the Inkjet Line Head, such as incorporating this head in Brother products, and searching for new opportunities in alliance with other companies, initially with its collaborator in the project (namely Kyocera) but we suspect they know thaey have a very adaptable technology and if you have a good idea for how this might be used, go see them.

The Brother printer was spotted by Red of the Red Ferret Journal – a remarkable resource of remarkable things – kinda like Gizmag really.