Silverbrook Research claims 2 pages / second "memjet" inkjet invention
By Conrad Quilty-Harper 
posted Mar 18th 2007 1:03PM
posted Mar 18th 2007 1:03PM
Previous examples have taught us that when a company that has never produced a single product claims that it's going to turn the printer industry on its head, it's right to approach the company with caution. Nevertheless, Silverbrook Research, an Australian company that has over 1,400 patents to its name, is claiming that it is finally ready to reveal its "Memjet" inkjet printer technology after ten years of research. The technology -- which supposedly uses a printhead that spans the width of an A4 page -- will be detailed in a paper by a marketing research firm later next week, but get this: it'll cost you $2,995 to access it. Wait, it gets better: accompanying the news is a blurry video of a box feeding out pages at a rate of a page every couple of seconds. If we ignore this dodgy presentation, there's at least one "innovation" that Silverbrook is promising that could be met by any other printer manufacturer overnight: a relatively reasonable ink cost of 50ml for under $20. In fact, screw the advanced printer tech: someone create a printer that uses cheaper ink per milliliter than a bottle of 1985 vintage Dom Perignon and we'll buy it (the ink, that is).[Via texyt]
'The technology -- -- will be unveiled in a paper later next week, but get this: it'll cost you $2,995 to access it.'
Very interesting story, but that part is wrong, according to the articles that you have linked to.
The $2,995 paper and the product unveiling are actually separate events, from unrelated companies.
" In fact, screw the advanced printer tech: someone create a printer that uses cheaper ink per milliliter than a bottle of 1985 vintage Dom Perignon and we'll buy it (the ink, that is)."
I am confused, maybe engadget has not found the news yet. The whole printer industry is based on the blade and razor handle model. The printers are already dirt cheap and they make their money on soaking you on the printer ink. Although Kodak believes they can change this, it is not going to happen. There are plenty of companies that make continous ink systems that can lower cost. All the printer companies make money from supplies. Take a look at HPs quarterly report sometime.
The Last Mimzy Printer
Ink costs so much because most companies sell their printers at a loss, only to recoup that investment (and in many cases, much more) by consumer purchases of ink cartridges.
A ml of ink goes quite a lot further than a ml of Dom Perignon.
According to two of the articles on the site Engadget has linked to:
http://texyt.com/silverbrook+memjet+printer+inkjet+canon+epson+hp+mems+iprint+lyra
http://texyt.com/silverbrook+memjet+printer+inkjet+mems+lyra+canon+epson+hp+kodak
1 The expensive report about this technology (the 'paper') is from a Market Research firm, Lyra Research, NOT a marketing firm - rather different
2 There'll be some kind of public announcement from the inventors, Silverbrook Research, next week, so the market research report is irrelevant for most people.
4 They're claiming this printer produces one page per second, not two as it says in the title here.
5 'video of a box feeding out pages at a rate of a page every couple of seconds' - I've looked and it looks like about one page every 1.1 seconds to me.
(though maybe it has a 3 hour warm up time /jk)
Thanks for a fascinating story, well presented.
Why do I want this instead of a color laser?
Because inkjet is better than laser
Dont be idiots!! This is SO obviuosly a hoax, Conrad is right to say its exactly like the Infinimum Phantom.
That video is rediculous . Dont you think they could just have already have printed the paper and just roll it out very fast? I'll beleive it when I see it!
its not fake. this is a real serious company with lots of employees, they have been around for decades. i have a personal connection to the company, thats why i know this.
This is very interesting however I believe this technology already exists. HP has been working on a technology called Edgeline for the past 5 years. THe first Edgeline boxes will be available in April. Edgeline uses a similar printhead technology and prints at higher speeds than any HP color printer on the market.
Google search edgeline for additional info.
Agreed!!!
There are significant cost structure drawbacks to laser. Also, to many working components. For the companies that have figured it out, ie HP - Lexmark - Epson, ink is so simple.
I was thinking mainly of the print quality, and it's a simpler machine like you said. What are the cost structure drawbacks?
Quilty-Harper fails again. (¬_¬)
prolly that blurry-azz video show's the real printing quality lol
No, it's a phonecam video. I think someone naughty sneaked it with their phonecam, that's why its such lousy quality.
I really don't get the skepticism of the Engadget post. The video shows a very impressive working prototype. The company that produced the tech, Silverbrook, has deals with several major printer manufacturers to licence the tech-- they haven't announced plans to become a printer manufacturer.
The $2995 price has nothing to do with the price of a printer, it is the cost of a research paper offered by another, unrelated company called Lyra which sums up what is known about the new technology. It isn't like this research paper is geared to the home user market-- it is likely market analysis, impact on current technology, and future trends and manufacturing costs.
I don't see anything "dodgy" here. I wouldn't mind an inkjet printer that can spit out pages as fast as a laser printer or Kinkos copier.
The cost structure drawbacks of laser are all over the place. I will list them as bullet points.
- Inkjet printer are smaller in form factor for like/similar document output.
- Inkjet printer cartridges are significantly complex from a technology and moving parts perspective vs. toner cartridges.
- Inkjet printers do not require heat.
- Inkjet printers do not require the complexity of color laser pritners in transfering the impage from the drum to the image transfer unit to the paper.
- Inkjet printers do not have image transfer units or fusers.
- Inkjet printers can handle WAY more types of paper media.
- Inkjet printers use a zero contact transfer process. Meaning that the paper never touches the printhead.
This is nothing new. I have seen similar commercial poster printers that print at similar inch per min. They have a ink head array that is as wide as the paper. I have seen Black and white ink jets that print 120 pages per min duplex. Ink jet envelope printers have gotten to 400 envelopes per min. This only looks amazing to people that haven't been involved in commercial printers.
"This is nothing new. I have seen similar commercial poster printers that print at similar inch per min. They have a ink head array that is as wide as the paper. I have seen Black and white ink jets that print 120 pages per min duplex. This only looks amazing to people that haven't been involved in commercial printers."
Put one of your commercial printers on my desktop for $200, and I'll agree with you. Because that's what these guys claim they're going to do.
If it were, someone has a very steady hand because there is no 'phone in my hand as I hold it up to record' movements.
Does the tail end of each sheet of paper seem to "fall" too fast, as if they're made out of metal or something? Perhaps they just sped up the video.
Yeah, I agree the way the paper falls in the video looks REALLY strange. Almost like it's pulled down.
Its been done before just never as a commercial printer. I want to say it was brother who did it for a display at some industry event (although might have the company wrong). They had the ink being drawn from large bottles and just used a bunch of their standard print heads and mounted them in a box so that as the paper fed through they could hit every inch of the surface. The only thing slowing it down was the paper feeding.
The problem is that most of the cost here is going to be the print head. The cost of replacing it is going to be so high it might be better to just replace the entire printer when it fails. Also ink jets have their print head dry out and get clogged if they are unused for several weeks.
Spent a few minutes and found it using Google. http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/07/brothers-170-pages-per-minute-inkjet-printer/
it was Brother and it could do 170 pages a minute.
OK, so lets say a bottle of '85 DP is $325, just to make the math easy (that's a little above average price these days). So it's $0.50/ml. Epson ink for my photo printer (2200) is about $2/ml. I'm using a fine art ink in refillable carts, and I'm paying $18 for a 4oz bottle, or about $0.15/ml.
Even the Pantone stuff is only about $200/liter in bulk.
I believe its the type of paper, its provably thick an fast absorbing for the ink, besides its just been rolled over and might be bending back. Its perfectly believable.
This is interesting, from the same website. It's already being used for a product labeling system, so maybe it will be available sooner that you think
http://texyt.com/hyperlabel+silverbrook+memjet+printer+inkjet+product+label+kodak
Kodak announced a set of consumer injet printers (all-in-one "everyday" printers, not just for photos) whose highlighted feature is $10 black and $15 color ink cartridges. I believe they are supposed to be available this month sometime.
Guys I'm not sure if this perticular printer in the article is going to be available soon but I am positive that the CM8060 and CM8050 will be available from HP in April. These two new printers will have HP Edgeline technology which is the basically a fancy name for large print head. You will see $0.04 / page and up to 71ppm for A4 color output.
Google search Edgeline.
"I believe its the type of paper, its provably thick and fast absorbing for the ink, besides its just been rolled over and might be bending back. Its perfectly believable."
The paper must be going over the top of a roller, shouldn't it be bent the other way?
It really looks like it's pulled down, it drops so fast. If there's not something sneaky going on, I was thinking perhaps they could even have some kind of little fan sucking air out underneath the paper to dry it and maybe pull it down out of the way of the next sheet
Two pages per second? Does that include the fadey mirror copy that will result when a sheet of paper lands on a just-printed inkjet page?
I'm guessing it either has super-fast-drying ink or uses some sort of special paper.
Inkjet printers with toner ink. FTW. Sure toner is expensive (~120), but you can print like 10,000+ pages before it runs out. It's what schools use (It's what my Graphics/Screenprinting class used)
I call shenanigans. One thing inkjet printers can't do is print bleeds, a.k.a. all the way to the edge of the page. If you try it, you get lots of messy ink on the feeders which ruins the edges of each page and gunks up the machine as well. The pages coming out in the video have bleeds. I agree with the skeptics, they were fed in there pre-printed,
"I call shenanigans. One thing inkjet printers can't do is print bleeds, a.k.a. all the way to the edge of the page. If you try it, you get lots of messy ink on the feeders which ruins the edges of each page and gunks up the machine as well. The pages coming out in the video have bleeds. I agree with the skeptics, they were fed in there pre-printed,"
No, you're wrong. If you imagine how it could work with a wide inkhead, the paper needn't touch anything after the ink hits it
Way back when inkjets first came out, we took our drafting ink ($10 a quart) and refilled the cartriges ourselves. It has been years since I used one of these, but I wonder if the ink is the same. If it is, these companies have a great scam going.
"Way back when inkjets first came out, we took our drafting ink ($10 a quart) and refilled the cartriges ourselves. It has been years since I used one of these, but I wonder if the ink is the same. If it is, these companies have a great scam going."
The scam is to use the money from the tiny, overpriced ink cartridges to pay for the cheap printers.
Also they use every trick in the book to make you buy new cartriges.
For example,
Giving you half-empty starter cartridges with the printer
Saying they're empty when they're still 30% full
Not printing black when a color cartridge is empty
Using your amazingly expensive ink to clean the print head 10x a day
I think everyone's getting really sick of it.
>A ml of ink goes quite a lot further than a ml of Dom Perignon.
Not when there are young women involved.
on HPs site about edgeline technology it says that it can do 1 page every 5 seconds.
"You'll start seeing HP Edgeline Technology in many more high-performance HP products—including industrial printers and light production—in the future. In Spring 2007, this patented technology will redefine business printing with the combined benefits of ink and laser in a single device: fast printing speeds, excellent print quality for text and graphics, a low cost per page and HP world-class reliability. Stay tuned for more on HP Edgeline Technology."
It says nothing in there about edgeline being for consumers.
As for the video of this company's printer, I hope it's real, but I have a feeling it's not.
Edgeline will be available to consumers within the next 18 months. The first Edgeline boxes will be high speed digial copier type devices that will sell for 13-20k which is typical of color copiers in that segment.
Kodak recently announced a low-cost photo-quality inkjet with ink at half the price of competitors'.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/06/kodak-enters-the-desktop-printer-market-plans-to-rumble-with-hp/
I smell BS. Video looks staged without looking like it's being presented. For a short print area the paper has to really roll in a short area to meet the print heads and yet it shoots out so perfectly straight. Barely even a slight bow to it.
They will officially unveil the Memjet system at the Global Ink Jet and Thermal Printing Conference on Wednesday. They held "closed-door" sessions for it at the PMA conference in Las Vegas, plus the "Webcast" last week in affiliation with Lyra Research (the creators of the $3K "white paper.").
Here's some additional info that I dug up.
It appears that this company was started by some of the Kodak engineers that were involved in the now defunct HP-Kodak joint effort called "Phogenix" from a few years back. They are targeting the mid-high volume photo printing marketplace which is where the HP PhotoSmart Studios (using Edgeline) are selling today. It sounds like they have some good fundamental marking-engine technology, but it is not yet "productized" so it may be a while before something using Memjet technology can compete with Edgeline, which is already in the marketplace.
Silverbrook has issued a press release and several more example videos (of other prototypes) today. This is starting to look more and more real:
http://technabob.com/blog/2007/03/20/memjet-confirmed-get-ready-for-superfast-printing/
Hi everyone, my name is Andre Rebelo, and I work at Lyra Research, (www.lyra.com), the company that first reported this news on Memjet in a press release and in a Webcast. We're thrilled by the active discussion that this new technology has generated, on Texyt, wiredblogs, ministryoftech, zedomax, and especially here at Engadget's blog. I wanted to post to help provide some factual information and clarification that might help answer some questions or correct some assumptions in some of the previous comments. And, if you have more questions for me, feel free to email me at arebelo@lyra.com or call me at US-1+617+454+2658. I'll email you a PDF of the Webcast's slides.
* The Back-story: Lyra is a market research firm that focuses exclusively on the digital imaging industry. We provide forecasts, analysis, news, conferences, consulting, reports, and journals to the folks that make printers, copiers, digicams, cameraphones, inkjet and toner cartridges, photo paper, etc. You get the idea. Lyra was invited by Silverbrook Research, the Australian company behind this technology, for an exclusive sneak peek at their new Memjet technology. The Webcast and the related report are the results of this information-gathering mission.
* You know how 15-second stories on the 6 o'clock news often leave out a lot of information from the whole story, leaving a string of unanswered questions as they move on to the weather? Well, I think that, in a similar way, some of the snippets of info in the comments above might lead to more questions than answers. Get the facts: Lyra's Webcast is a great free resource for you to get an excellent overview on Memjet. Go here to see it (it runs about 35 min.): http://www.webcastgroup.com/client/start.asp?wid=0830315073194
* You won't be able to go out and buy a Memjet brand printer. Think of it roughly like "Intel Inside." You can't buy an Intel computer, but you can buy a computer that uses Intel technology. What you see in the video is a "reference design" -- a sort of prototype to demo their technology. Silverbrook will be licensing the Memjet technology with partner companies who will implement the technology in their products. So, the big question now is: who will be partnering with Silverbrook? Will it be an established printer maker or a newcomer with a lot of brand recognition in another field like consumer electronics? We don't know. What we do know is: look out for new products rolling out at the end of 2007 and into 2008 from such partner companies.
* About the video that you saw: Yes, it's real, there's no jiggery-pokery or hocus-pocus going on. It was not video'd by a cameraphone snuck into the company, although that does make a good story--Silverbrook _is_ very secretive. It was, in fact, video supplied to Lyra by Silverbrook and validates what our analyst Steve Hoffenberg saw with his own eyes (in addition to seeing a working photo printer, wide-format printer and a commercial volume printer). That video that's now on the web is taken from Lyra's Webcast.
Here's the deal: If we could have shown it in better quality, we would have. In order to load a decent quality video in a quick amount of time for the Webcast, Lyra had to shrink the file size according to our webcast vendor's specs (600k or less!). And, we had to convert it to Flash format. This is done to ensure that Webcast viewers didn't wait a long time for the video to load, and everyone is able to see it in a near-universal format (like YouTube videos).
Unfortunately, as you know, this means the quality was degraded. Since the Webcast aired (you can still watch an archive), several folks on the web have bootlegged it on to Google Video and a couple of other places. We'll take that as a compliment. :-) But, keep in mind, every time you upload a video like this to a video-related site, they often re-compress the file to their standards. So, you might be watching a very low quality video because it's gone thru several rounds of file degradation.
Having said all that, if you want to see a HIGH QUALITY VERSION of all sorts of Memjet technology printers in action, go to the just-launched Memjet site's video/media page: http://memjet.com/media.aspx . There are all sorts of cool videos here, including how they make the print heads, what they look like, and several samples of different reference design printers pumping out the pages! We could not use this video in our webcast because the Memjet site was just launched TODAY! This was planned to coincide with the technology being unveiled today in Kia Silverbrook’s keynote address at the Global Ink Jet Printing Conference in Prague. Go give them some eyeballs! (the release: http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070321005039&newsLang=en)
*How do they do that? How can they print bleeds?
I'm not the analyst, but here goes a basic explanation: As some folks mentioned in their posts, Memjet uses a page-wide array of inkjet nozzles. Usually you see inkjet nozzles attached at the bottom of the an ink cartridge and the cartridge furiously slides left and right to print across a page. This technology allows the page to pass under a page-wide set of 1600 dpi nozzles that basically dispense a page-wide swath of 1 picoliter droplets of ink to make the image. So, if you have an 8" wide sheet of paper, and an 9" wide nozzle array, you can safely cover all the paper.
Instead of ink jet cartridges with a printhead at the bottom, the printer only requires replacement ink tanks, similar to HP's Scalable Print Technology, SPT. These would cost about $20 to replace, but you're getting 50 ml.
And, to the gentleman that mentioned HP's Edgeline, yes, you're right: this is a similar technology. Memjet stands out because it's faster and cheaper. It's cheap enough to use on consumer /small-office applications as well as commercial applications (check out our webcast to see examples of different applications). Edgeline has a diverse number of applications but, due to cost, will likely be applied to high-volume, commercial printers or retail oriented devices like photo kiosks. To Memjet's credit, they've also partnered their inkjet printing technology with a high-performance on-board chip that has Over 40 million transistors and:
Calculates 900 million droplets/sec. in real time
Drives 70,400 nozzles
JPEG expansion in hardware
On-chip page memory
I/O ports
Motor control and I/O
Pretty cool for printer hardware. Bottom-line, it enables the printer to handle all the processing necessary at the speed required to print so fast. This is important because, it doesn't matter how fast your inkjet nozzles can print, if you don't have a processor that can keep up with the instructions.
Well, I've been typing away for some time so I'll leave it at this. I hope the above info is helpful in clarifying some of the back-story. Give a call or an email and I hope to be of additional assistance!
Vote up!