Don’t you just feel cheated buying Ink? I do and that’s why I started to look for cheaper alternatives like, compatibles, refills, recycled.Take a look at what another angry and dissatisfied UK printer user did when an error message came up, asking him to take his printer to the service centre…
Problem is that all the little inkjet blighter’s do this, so if you mainly print text letters consider buying a plain cheap mono laser printer.
Full article here
New technology – the result of a massive 1.4 billion US dollar investment – by market leading printer manufacturer Hewlett Packard: Edgeline series of multi-function ink based printers.
We’ve mentioned quite a few times already (in this young blog) how slow ink based printers usually are – but they give great benefits including, brilliant colour and clarity. HP has done a lot of market research and its conclusions were that business users that need high quality colour documents, pronto just can’t afford to wait. So HP opened their not very dusty wallet and pulled out over a billion dollars to create edgeline.
Edgeline is the new fancy name for what they have developed, or otherwise known as scalable printing technology. The new technology could revolutionise the future of printing in offices and eventually our homes. It has been used in recent HP devices to produce drops of ink onto paper or other media at up to 150 million drops per second – yes you read that right 150,000,000 minuscule drops of ink every second.
As the name of the new invention suggests – it is also scalable and they reckon that very soon their printers will be producing droplets of ink at 900 million and up to over 1.8 billion every second! Imagine the speed and quality that this would achieve – photo quality billboard size posters at lightning speed.
I remember printing an A4 photo in the early 1990’s with an Epson photo printer – these had the highest dpi available and therefore the highest assumed quality. Something the advert didn’t say was that it would take over half an hour, oh and you couldn’t just leave it printing in the background while you took the dog for a 10 mile walk, as the paper pick up roller wouldn’t usually feed the paper through.
Move forward in time to 2007…. a new development has been made by Brother, very clever and simple; they have 
invented a new printing head that doesn’t move! The printer’s head is as wide as the media or paper, taking away a massive time and process drain, so with the new printer the paper passes through – at break kneck speed – as the ink is fired onto the paper through the printer head. In order that the paper doesn’t have to pass through the printer three times there is a separate head for each colour and these all work at the same time.
This produces an amazing print speed of up to 800mm/ second and was recently demonstrated producing 150 full colour A6 pages per minute. Although the a6 size is only small – brother are working on joining the heads together side by side, to make a wider print area. They are talking about their new generation of printers being able to produce photo quality posters in the near future at incredible speeds. Let’s hope that the ink tanks are upgraded to cope with the extra work 🙂
Kodak recently announced that it is going to go head to head with the Inkjet ‘big boys’ in the home and small business inkjet printer market.
They are promising that the cost of printing with their new range of printers (going to be released sometime in May 2007) will be 50% less than the current market leaders HP.
It will be interesting to see how their battle to gain a foothold in such a competitive market place will pan out. But, I have always suggested that a company should try to reverse the printer strategy (sell printer hardware below cost – charge customer as they use it with way too expensive replacement ink cartridges).