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Sleep is for wimps!
April 2, 2008
Now, I know that some of you are thinking, “Isn’t whimp spelled with an h?” – but regardless of that, let’s discuss the fact that some of us don’t get much sleep. I usually get five to six hours, and that is something of an advantage. I sleep less; I work more. I also read, and write and draw illustrations. Sometimes I amaze myself with what is on the Internet (try
StumbleUpon!).
While not sleeping tonight, I encountered a very good blog written by a man named Nathan Moroney at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California. It contains his observations on color, pigments, dyes, and the management of color. His entry from yesterday is particularly good: You can read it
here.
Also while not sleeping, I have been snooping around, looking at information from Hewlett-Packard, and their competitor in the new field of micro-electronic manufacturing of ink-jet heads. These companies, and several others I am sure, are working to change the orientation of ink-jet heads.
I have a wide-format ink-jet printer. It sits in my home office about four feet behind me. When I print a 28 x 44 inch poster, which I did yesterday, the ink-jet heads go back and forth about a quintillion times to produce a printed product that is amazingly nice. It takes quite a while, but I remind myself that this is the state-of-the-art. It’s part of the reason that inexpensive printers like mine (about $5,000) can produce such nice work. In order to go faster, these printers would have to have either:
a. more ink-jet heads, or
b. more nozzles
Both
Hewlett-Packard and an Australian company called
Memjet have developed technologies that deliver more ink-jet nozzles in the same space, and this I believe is the dawn of a new era. I see this new era as important as the day that Ira Rubel accidentally invented offset printing. This era is more momentus, and it's no accident!
Hewlett-Packard's Edgeline print head features thousands of ink-jet nozzles, capable of printing a wide path of color simultaneously – about four inches. HP is already shipping products with this technology embedded. The HP HP CM8050/CM8060 workgroup printers use a number of these heads supported over a rotating drum to produce full-color office documents at very high speeds, and surprisingly good quality.
Both of these firms have developed ink-jet heads that have not ten or twenty nozzles, but tens of thousands of nozzles. And, thus we see they are both working to change the orientation of the print heads. Instead of moving the heads back and forth a quintillion times, they are turning the heads 90 degrees, and firing a quintillion nozzles simultaneously as the paper goes by. There is no back-and-forth anymore.
Memjet's print head also features thousands of ink-jet nozzles. When you line a few of these in a row, you get a wide-path ink-jet printer. Memjet is involved as a technology supplier in the development of various printing products. They show prototypes of a desktop printer, a wide-format printer, and a label printer on their web site.
As I learn more, I will reveal more. But, judging from the press materials released by HP last week, and the materials posted at Memjet’s web site, we are about to see a tidal change in the complextion of the printing industry. This change will be as revolutionary as offset printing I am sure. In the short-term it will make it possible for printers like the one a meter over my left shoulder to print a photo-quality poster in one minute instead of one hour. The price will likely be higher, but the productivity will jump many-fold.
Posted by Brian Lawler on April 2, 2008 | Comments (0)
