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Brother goes back to the future with inkjet innovations
Printer manufacturer invests in low energy technologies as paper becomes more precious
Innovations
in inkjet, rather than laser printing, hold the key to developing a new
generation of highly energy efficient printers, according to printer
manufacturer Brother.Speaking to IT Week’s BusinessGreen blog, Mike
Dinsdale head of communications and CSR at Brother UK and a former
engineer at the company, said that it was impossible to deliver
significant improvements in the energy efficiency of laser printers and
as a result, environmentally-conscious firms were likely to turn to
next generation inkjet printers as a means of reducing the energy
consumption of their printers.”We might be able to cut laser printers’
energy use by 10 percent or so, but laser is by definition an energy
hungry technology,” he said. “If you are going to deliver real energy
efficiency it has to come from inkjet, and the trick is to make the
print head long enough so that it doesn’t have to move and you don’t
need a motor.”Dinsdale said Brother was currently developing a long
head inkjet printer for printing photographs, which would be available
by 2009 and promises to print 170 pages a minute boasting 600dpi and
using just 13.5w/h of energy. In contrast, he said a current inkjet
printer would use 40w/h and a laser printer up to 600w/h. He added that
the company was also working on a similar long head printer for office
use that would consume just 60w/h when in use.Dinsdale predicted that
growing concerns over the energy consumption of IT kit, particularly
among public sector accounts, would convince many companies to adopt
the new generation of inkjet printers.”At the moment laser has an
advantage in terms of speed, but long head will change tha,” he argued.
“We’re convinced inkjet has a big future, though we accept it will need
a real shift in industry and customer attitudes. It is concern over
energy consumption that will stimulate that change in attitude.”The new
energy efficiency inkjet printers are just part of a wider
environmental strategy, according to Dinsdale, which has seen the
company invest heavily in non-printer technologies, such as reusable
paper and electronic paper display units that could help promote the
paperless office.”We have to accept that paper will become more
precious and we may have to move on,” he said. “We are throwing a huge
amount of money into research and the vast majority of it isn’t going
into conventional technologies, but into new systems.”
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