New Print Technology delivers high-speed, quality color at breakthrough Price/Performance

A new color printing technology known as Memjet looks set to impact the industry at potentially disruptive levels based on the public demonstrations so far. It is the first printing technology to combine high speed and quality color at a leading price/performance level, and was unveiled earlier this week in Kia Silverbrook’s keynote address at the Global Ink Jet Printing Conference in Prague. The new technology prints full-color images at 60 pages per minute (ppm), (videos here), 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. Printing costs for the basic desktop printer are expected to be less than US$0.02 for a mono page, and US$0.06 for a color page with 20 percent coverage. There’s more to come – read on to understand why the technology is scalable from 20mm to more than 2 meters (6 feet), and could hence be incorporated into mobile phones and digital cameras while at the other end of the scale, it could lead to large-format commercial printing applications with the ability to print a personalised newspaper.

According to an article on TEXYT, the “majority of existing inkjet printers use ink cartridges with a capacity of about 10ml, and prices of $10 to $20. Silverbrook's A4 desktop printer's individual color ink cartridges hold 50ml of ink, and will sell for less than $20 each, the company forecasts. Other products at an advanced stage of development include a small photo printer for printing snapshots (see the reference design on the right). Again, this is claimed to be much faster than anything else on the market, with a speed of 2 seconds per page, compared to about one minute per page for existing home photo printers. This has a target retail price of $150, and a cost per print of $0.10 to $0.20.”

The Memjet technology, which has been in development for more than 10 years, is backed by more than 1,400 U.S. patents; about 2,000 more are pending. Silverbrook Research, the developer of the Memjet technology, received 452 Memjet-related patents from the U.S. Patent Office last year alone. Patents have also been awarded and are pending in many other countries. TEXYT has more interesting details on Silverbrook and its patents here, and the Sydney Morning Herald and USAToday recognised the prolific patent activity at Silverbrook several years ago.

“Memjet’s technology delivers on the promise of inkjet for the broader market, with very fast speeds, high-quality color, and significantly lower purchase and operating costs,” said Robert Palmer, director of printer research for market analyst firm InfoTrends. “With its strong patent portfolio, Memjet is in a favorable position to expand the market opportunities for inkjet technology. Clearly, this is a technology to watch.”

“Conventional wisdom is that you cannot have high speed, quality color and low cost all at once,” said Bill McGlynn, CEO of Memjet’s home and office business. “This technology turns that notion on its head, making page-wide color printing practical and cost-effective. We believe this breakthrough technology will change the printing industry by eliminating the cost and performance barriers of color, and by allowing both incumbents and non-incumbents to compete on a new playing field.”

Speed, Color and Price/Performance

The page-wide, ultra-compact technology combines the low cost and ease of use of inkjet technology with the speed and quality of laser, all at a competitive price.

Speed: The technology can print full-color, photo-quality images (4x6” or A6) at 30 ppm, full-color and black-and-white business communication (8.5x11” or A4) at 60 ppm, and draft mode at 90 ppm. In the label, tag and ticket market, this translates into 6 inches per second for full 1600x1600 color printing and 12 inches per second for 1600x800 color printing. This compares to industry standards of about 1 to 2 ppm for 4x6” photos, 10 to 15 ppm for cost-effective “business” color, and 30 ppm for draft mode. The technology also replaces similar-speed, 200 dpi label-printing technologies with a high-resolution color alternative.

A customized driver chip controls each printhead and can calculate 900 million dots per second. Because the Memjet technology prints the whole page at a time, without any warm-up time, the optimized system virtually eliminates waiting for a print job.

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