First look at Memjet enterprise inkjet technology
Having grown up in the mainframe days, I have memories of nearly going deaf in data centers while the chain/band printers went to town getting out checks/statements/etc in the front room of the "glass house". What made them deafening also made them fast since they were of the category of "line printers" where an entire line of text was slammed onto the paper at a time. Well a company called Memjet has come up wi
Follow @infoworldHaving grown up in the mainframe days, I have memories of nearly going deaf in data centers while the chain/band printers went to town getting out checks/statements/etc in the front room of the "glass house". What made them deafening also made them fast since they were of the category of "line printers" where an entire line of text was slammed onto the paper at a time. Well a company called Memjet has come up with the guts for a whole new generation of inkjet printers that in effect is the next generation of line printer.
Key to this new technology is a ink nozzle array that spans the width of the entire page, radical new nozzle design that allows for drop sizes previously unheard of (which they claim eliminates the need for light cyan and light magenta for photo quality color), reformulated ink and some sexy driver chips to keep it all running in sync. You've just got to see the video on their site to understand just what their tech is capable of providing.
Now let me be VERY clear...this is NOT a product yet. Those demos are of engineering prototypes used to demonstrate the Memjet technology in real world applications. These folks are hoping that various printer manufacturers will be willing to OEM this base technology and package it into a finished product. Think of this as a peek into a crystal ball that might predict the kinds of printers we'll get to see in the near future.
So with ink running through my veins after a tenure with Xerox (as a Printer Product Interfacing Specialist) I just had to poke and prod the engineers with some questions on the underlying tech:
