Printer

July 4, 2007 A new mega-sized inkjet printer went on show at SHANGHAI AD & Sign 2007 in China yesterday when NUR Macroprinters showed its advanced NUR Expedio Revolution which prints images up to five meters (16.6ft) wide, enabling it to print billboards in a single pass. Apart from its impressive size, the Expedio Revolution offers unsurpassed printing speed at 300 sq.m (3,200 sq.ft) per hour and can be configured for high quality double-sided printing at 90 sq.m /hr. But wait, there’s more – so that it doesn’t sit idle when there are no billboards to print, it’s capable of multi-roll printing on three rolls simultaneously allowing users to print different files on each roll, reducing costly substrate waste. As there’s effectively no limit to the length of each print, this baby can print an image 5 meters tall and 60 metres long - in an hour. Just the thing for gift wrapping houses.  Read More

March 23, 2007 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.  Read More

February 23, 2007 Canon delivered a very useful new capability for road warriors in its raft of imaging-related announcements yesterday, in the form of the PIXMA iP90v Photo Printer which has the ability to print high quality photos or documents on the go. The iP90v fits easily in a briefcase or carry-on bag, weighs just four pounds, has a fast print speed, wireless printing and will sell for around US$250.  Read More

June 12, 2005 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.  Read More

Imagine a machine which accepts CAD drawings, then produces a three dimensional prototype within a few hours for $100 - it now exists. The successful implementation of the technology points the way to this technology eventually finding its way into local bureau which produce while-you-wait samples as a service, and eventually to the home where designs could be downloaded from the internet and manifested at whim.  Read More