HP claims latest printer a record-breaker

Ink-based printers are now capable of matching the fast throughput speeds of colour laser printers as HP adds the Edgeline range to its portfolio. The new printers process printouts at a rate up to 50 colour prints per minute, which beats many of the company's LaserJets and is approximately 10 times the speed of current ink- …

[John Ridley]

NEW technology???

I remember multi-head high speed dot matrix impact printers back in the 80s. The motors they needed to jiggle 5 or 6 hefty impact heads back and forth at about 5 times a second was impressive, and the things could shake a flimsy table apart in minutes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Err..

Tektronix Phaser solid ink printers have been doing this for years, nothing new in that.

[Ralph B]

Replacement Ink Cartridge Price?

Is a new print head included in the ink cartridge as is standard inkjet tech? If so, that's gonna be one expensive consumable!

[Ady]

new technolgy ?? don't make me laugh

Starting from 1986-1987 there was a company called Array Printers AB in Sweden, and they invented exactly such a technology as this, but they used toner in their technology, not liquid inks.

The basic technology was exactly the same though, they used nozzles to apply the toner directly on paper, and then a set of 'regular' fuser heated rolls fixed it on the paper.

Here's a pdf I found around the net that presented exactly this thing, from a conference in 1998:

www.mscsoftware.com/support/library/conf/adams/euro/1998/euc98_23.pdf

Here's another presentation of how it worked, go to page 16 of their 1999 annual report:

www.flymeeurope.com/pdf/annualreport99.pdf

Around 2000...2002 the company had some tough times though, and suffered a major reorganization. I think that that company, flymeurope is somehow related to them and someone there might know more about the fate of Array Printers AB.

Even their website, array.se disappeared and is currently occupied by a domain squatter.

Since then I have not seen their technology mentioned around much, it seems the development stopped in 2002.

Here's a rough list of their patents:

http://www.patentstorm.us/assignees/Array_Printers_AB-79105-1.html

Ady

[Hodge]

Looks like printing will get a lot faster

Was reading about a similar development a few weeks ago... Silverbrook Research has working hardware, and this article specifically mentions the option of licensing it to HP:

http://www.physorg.com/news93863377.html

[Edwin]

What a finding...

Granted, it's not a bad idea, but as has already been pointed out, none of this is new - in and of itself.

In the 1970s, we had line printers that would put these HP beasties to shame on raw output... No colours or pics though.

[Micha Roon]

That took them long enough !!!

I have visited some HP factories back in 1994 and the head of R&D told us about exactly that technology being in development and even showed an early prototype.

I always wondered why they didn't commercialize the thing and then figured that it was too much of a competition to their lazer printers.

Whatever the reason, it's always great to see something new even if the idea isn't.

Inkjet has the advantage of not needing a fuser to fix the dots on paper and therefor need a lot less energy to do the job.

[Lee Humphries]

Higher speed printing

Completely wrong category of printer, but it's always good seeing printing speeds stated in meters per second:

http://www.manroland.com/PROD/prod1_01_03.htm water based inks too. Apparently if these things jam a great section of the roll is pretty much instantly incinerated by the driers (or maybe that's a different model)

Some of the old bank statement printers (80s) required the continuous feed paper to be put on a special conveyor belt that accelerated the whole box at the printer before it started up so that it wouldn't simply rip off the first sheet. As they printed a great ribbon of paper was spewed out that required some poor lackies to carefully burst it and pack it into envelopes.