IBM Proposes the Fastest Laser Printer in the World
By: Tudor Raiciu, Technology and Science Editor
IBM wants to maintain its leading position on the high speed printer market,
which was estimated last year at $6.1 billion. And what a better way to do this, than to produce new high-end models?
So, the IBM specialists have announced that the new Infoprint 4100 printer could easily enter the Guinness Book, the device having a speed of 330 pages per minute.
If that figure doesn’t seem amazing, then you should compare it to the number of pages which can be printed by a regular laser printer: 22 pages.
Infoprint 4100, according to IBM’s statements, can print Tolstoi’s War and Peace in less than a minute. There are only a few models faster than this, but none of them from the laser class.
But performance has its price, Info Print 4100 not being accessible to many. The basic version of the printer costs $500,000 and the spearhead of the series costs $1 million. Such a monster measures 2.6 meters in length, 1.5 meters in height and 0.9 meters in thickness.
World’s fastest inkjet printer?
Posted by Red in future tech | E-Mail This Entry |
The Brother Industries high speed inkjet printer in prototype form. Codenamed Cobra, this little puppy can spit out any size of print output at around 170 pages per minute. OK, you want me to back up and repeat that? Any size of printed inkjet paper output at 170 pages every sixty seconds. Demonstrated for the first time ever last week at a Brother press seminar. How are they doing it? Well….
So apparently the secret lies in the use of new Piezo Inkjet Line Head technology, which prints at 600×600 dpi, but doesn’t actually move at all. The ink is transferred at high speed as the paper passes underneath the static nozzles. (see below left - click on all images for full view)
In order to get the throughput, the printer contains a separate head for each colour, so that the paper receives all the ink in one high speed sweep. The passel of assembled journalists at the demonstration last week saw this beast churn out 150 A6 pages a minute without drawing breath, which was pretty darn impressive.
(see below right for a scan of the actual printed output)
The company boffins at the demo told us that in order to achieve this speed for larger paper sizes, they just need to connect up more heads in a wider array. For instance, two heads joined together longways would give A4 printing. The concept of poster sized inkjet prints being produced at offset litho printing speeds is little short of miraculous. But just think of the ink costs…ouch!
Conventional inkjet New technology
Apparently this technology also features the lowest power requirements of any inkjet head on the market, and is smaller than equivalent spec products, which should eventually mean good things for home as well as industrial users. Eventually? Well, the technology was first announced at this year’s Cebit exhibition in Germany, but this was the first ever live demonstration to the media, and the company is being very coy on any production dates. In fact it seems that the tech needs some co-operative funding (i.e. a production partner?) in order to progress further. And no word on potential retail pricing was given either.
So for now the printer is seeing action only at the World Fair in Aichi, Japan, printing out A6 sheets for tourist visitors to the Brother pavilion. Here’s hoping we see more of this amazing technology sooner rather than later. In the meantime here’s a PDF of the technology paper.
Specification Notes.
Head - 2656 nozzles per head, 600 dpi, 108 mm width (4.25 inches).
Print speed – 800 mm per second.
Energy saving – Deformable Piezo actuator provides 1/14 of the power requirement of conventional nozzles. For example, the A6 picture sample on the right requires only 3 watts of power, at 150 sheets per minute.
Size – Trapezoidal nozzle zone shape provides for dense arrangement of cavities. The result is a head which is 152 mm wide, 22 mm deep and 1 mm high. Heads can be arranged in longer arrays as needed.
Droplet size – Unspecified. 4 sizes available.
Reliability – 10 billion dots/nozzle or more (still testing).
Fastest printer in the world
The Mitsuibishi Diamondstar 90 is reportedly the fastest offset printer in the world, capable of running 90,000 color newssheets per hour. Link (via Red Ferret)
IBM has the world’s fastest printer
IBM launched the world’s fastest laser printer, the Infoprint 4100. This one our politicians are going to love come election time. With the ability to churn out 330 pages per minute, campaign materials such as flyers and sample ballots can be printed on demand giving them more leeway on who’s to include and exclude even on the last minute.
Having unlimited funds, they can easily get one for at least $500,000. They can even have the top-of-the-line version for $1,000,000.
Just how fast is it?
The device can churn out Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in less than a minute or print documents spanning the Empire State Building in less than 4 minutes.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace have approximately 1500 pages. Of course, it can serve other purpose besides campaign material printing. Via CNN
See Also:
Links For these details are follows
Oldest Printers
http://allprinters.blogspot.com to get all details of printers
Latest printers
http://latestprinters.blogspot.com to get details of latest printers
Fastest printers
http://fastestprinters.blogspot.com to get details of fastest printers
Smallest printers
http://smallestprinters.blogspot.com to get details of smallest printers
Largest printers
http://largestprinters.blogspot.com to get details of largest printers
