Silverbrook Research, an R+D company based in Sydney, has developed what is claimed to be the world’s fastest inkjet printer, its MemJet, which features a print head that's as wide as the paper it prints on.
Memjet features an unprecedented 70,400 photolithographed nozzles and outputs an almost beyond-belief 900 million drops-per-second, producing 60 full colour A4 pages a minute.
In its wide format version Memjet outputs full colour images at a blistering one foot a second, a sensational output rate which if successful in its commercial format will change the face of wide format printing. The wide format printer is due to be released in 2008 with a rpeorted price tag of around $5000.
Memjet will be available in its A4 guise for less than $200 when it arrives on the market late next year. Charles LeCompte, president of leading printer market analysis firm, Lyra Research, says, "This thing is gigantic, we've been in this business for 20 years and I've never seen something as mind boggling."
If Memjet, which is thought to use nano-technology, does make it to the shop floor, wide format inkjet printers can expect to see commercial versions shortly afterwards.
With its phenomenal productivity the wide format developers will be looking very closely at its potential, Memjet may well be come the universal print engine for wide format.
Silverbrook Research is run by Kia Silverbrook the former head of Canon's Australian R+D operation. Silverbrook Research isn’t a manufacturer, but rather it licenses its technologies, which is why Memjet will be on the shelves under various brands by the end of next year.
Silverbrook Research has remarkably joined some of the world’s giant corporations on the Patent Scorecard Top Ten.The Scorecard lists those corporations filing patents, based on the content and quality. Nine of the ten names on the list are household names, headed by IBM, with Microsoft second, HP third, Hitachi fourth, Sun fifth, Ricoh sixth, Canon seventh, and then Silverbrook in eighth spot, ahead of Seiko Epson in ninth and Xerox in tenth spot.
