Brother's 170 pages per minute inkjet printer
By Peter Rojas 
posted Jun 7th 2005 9:50AM
posted Jun 7th 2005 9:50AM
We hardly ever talk about printers around here, mainly because there's not much you can say about 'em unless they're printing out sushi or human skin or in 3D or whatever, but Brother has been showing off a prototype for a new inkjet printer called the "Cobra" which uses a Piezo Inkjet Line Head to pump out as many as 170 pages per minute (ten pages per minute is far more typical). None other than the Red Ferret himself hit up the recent press demo and he says that it could be a while before printers using the new technology start showing up in stores.
Great. Now printer overclocking. Where can I get my phase-change cooling element for my inkjet?
So- where do the 2-gallon ink cartridges go?
So- where do the 2-gallon ink cartridges go?
"cartridges"? puhleeze. You insult us with your wimpy printer terminology.
This bad boy uses a gravity feed system with dual inline 55 gallon ink drums.
Let's see your pansy printer beat that!
blah blah blah. old news, ive had one of these for 6 years (inkjet printer that prints many pages). mine is also more streamlined.
http://retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/pr2400.jpg
2 and 3:
Exactly. Even though it can do 170 ppm, what's the ink capacity?
I can't imagine there's an internal reservoir that can handle that many pages.
So how is this useful other than a proof-of-concept?
It would need to connect to an external ink source, which is messy as hell.
What's the per page cost? I can't imagine this would be competitive with typical 4 colour offset printing, either in per page cost or speed.
This just seems like a design sample... I can't see much lead into a viable consumer product.
I'm gonna hold out for HP's PowerStroke diesel printers. They're loud and a bit smoky, but the pages are thrown out with a very torquey roller wheel.
#2
it's not very common in home offices or bedrooms, but plenty of professional folks already using somethng called continuous inking - you remove the stock cartridges and replace them with special ones that have hoses, then you run the hoses to large bottles of ink. it's been done for years, especially for plotters and photo-printers. in fact, if you look at the photo, you can see the 4 hoses pumping CMYK direct to the printhead from tanks(probably under the table or behind the unit)
needless to say, you can print an incredible number of pages before you need to buy refills. and $/page it's maybe 10x less expensive to buy ink in bottles for continuous inking than it would be to print the same volume with cartridges. given that this thing prints out 170ppm it's probably going to need some big bottles, but 170ppm may be draft mode which uses a fraction of the ink for each page.
#4, it's actually not that messy, especially if you set up the hoses properly and don't let the bottles empty completely. i'd rather deal with some hoses+valves and a bottle swap than a toner cartridge any day. i've never ruined clothing or carpeting making sure i had ink...
Constructive criticism: Why *doesn't* Engadget cover printers more? I'd love to see more coverage of the latest models. Seriously.
You said "there’s not much you can say about ‘em" but how many of the cellphones and digital cameras you cover have an actual new innovation like printing sushi? Most of them are just tiny incremental improvements, and new printers with incremental improvements are coming out all the time. I for one would like to see more about printers.
Engadget does an amazing job covering cellphones, digicams, and USB memory sticks shaped like ducks, but some gadgets (printers, scanners, stereos) really lack attention.
Folks, this is much more than just a fancy proof of concept. These guys were serious about it, and the ink thing is definitely not an issue if you use continuous ink feeds as the prototype did.
I suspect that it will be targeted at the business (or industrial) market at first, rather than the home user, but nevertheless as a technology demonstration it was definitely very impressive.
It's a special-application printer. It'll enable customized direct-mail pieces to be done in-house. They'll sell a ton of them.
the fact that they're laying A6 prints out for people (and that the head is 4.25") leads me to believe that, among industrial use - this technology would be great for digital kiosk printers. the drop placement better be pretty spot on, though. i wonder if they are using multiple drop sizes with this head?
do not expect to take this kind of printing system in to the home.
brother piezo heads have always been pretty blah as far as photo quality goes. their MFCs are probably worst in class for photo quality, and only Kodak was able to get really good photo quality from brother heads (in the form of the defunct 5260 wide format printer, awesome machine, wish they had decided to build it!) Maybe the partnership with Kyocera has given then some new technology to work with.
and yeah, you guys really should cover more printer news!
#9 - Depending on the quality and size of the piece, I'd imagine that is a possibility for small businesses at some point in the future. I just don't really see it happening.
This little guy can't replace the print quality, technology, features, and ripping capabilities of an iGen3 or Nexpress digital press.
The specs from Brother (http://www.brother.com/brother_En/e-topics/inkjet/inkjet.pdf) indicate that the capacity is about 10 billion dots/nozzle. At 600 dots per inch on 11" long paper, that's a little over 150,000 sheets per nozzle. Hard to believe... but then again... so is 170 ppm.
I can't wait to buy one, when they cost $10,000. I am using a riso duplicator that prints 120 ppm on 11x17 but the graphic quality is poor. Riso has a current model that has a line print head and large ink tanks, that runs at around 100 ppm but it's $40,000. Brother, please start production. You will make a fortune.
All , difficult to find informtion, even directly from brother: is there more informations links (and from kyocera)?