STEALTH INKJET PRINTER TO ROCK INDUSTRY

[Anonymous]

Stealth Inkjet Printer Startup Could Rock Industry
An
Australian entrepreneur betting his company on a nanotech-fueled,
consumer inkjet printer that can print sixty pages a minute for under
$200 has successfully demonstrated the technology.Silverbrook Research
has spent the last ten years developing Memjet, a printer that uses an
array of ink jet nozzles that spans the width of the paper. Company
executives have said they feel that they can ship an 8×10 color inkjet
by the end of 2008 that will cost less than $200 and print 60 pages a
minute.Whether or not the company will be able to deliver on its
promises is the question that plagues any startup. But one leading
printer analyst said he’s witnessed the demonstration personally, and
that he’s been briefed on the company’s plans to manufacture components
and license the technology to interested parties.”I’ve seen it with my
own eyes,” said Charlie LeCompte, president of Lyra Research, which
tracks the printer market. “They’ve been showing several models since
January. I’ve seen the photo printer running; I haven’t seen the letter
printer running, but other people [at Lyra] have.””I’ve been following
this industry for 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything of this scale:
10 times faster, 20 times cheaper, all at once,” LeCompte
added.Silverbrook plans to offer the Memjet technology as part of
several products: a photo printer, which the company hopes to sell for
less than $150; the 8×10 color inkjet, due to arrive at the end of 2008
for under $200; a label printer; and a large-format photo printer,
expected to cost about $5,000, and capable of printing poster-sized
prints “twenty times faster than anything I’ve ever seen,” LeCompte
said.”Conventional wisdom is that you cannot have high speed, quality
color and low cost all at once,” said Bill McGlynn, chief executive of
Memjet’s home and office business, in a statement. “This technology
turns that notion on its head, making page-wide color printing
practical and cost-effective. We believe this breakthrough technology
will change the printing industry by eliminating the cost and
performance barriers of color, and by allowing both incumbents and
non-incumbents to compete on a new playing field.”

Silverbrook
executives could not be reached by post time, although a spokeswoman
for the company said that they were in Prague for an international
inkjet conference.
The maximum resolution achievable is
1600×1600, according to Silverbrook. Photo-quality printing on the 8×10
printer can be achieved at 30 pages per minute; standard office-quality
color prints are printed at 60 pages per minute, and draft mode prints
90 pages per minute.Typical inkjet printers, known as “serial
printers,” use an inkjet nozzle that passes back and forth along a
horizontal axis, spraying ink along the surface of the paper. The
Memjet technology uses a series of individual MEMS-based inkjet
nozzles, fabricated using conventional semiconductor manufacturing
techniques. Each chip measures 20 millimeters across and contains 6,400
nozzles, with five color channels, the company said. A separate driver
chip calculates 900 million picoliter-sized drops per second. For a
standard A4 letter printer, the result is a total of 70,400
nozzles.Silverbrook has already signed deals with third-party
manufacturers to actually manufacture the components, using the
company’s intellectual property, a key requirement if the company is
going to be able to scale up production to compete with the millions of
printers HP, Epson, and others sell each year. TSMC will make the print
heads, LeCompte said. Right now, Silverbrook itself is manufacturing
the machine that butts, or assembles, the print heads next to one
another, although LeCompte reported that Silverbrook management didn’t
believe that to be a problem.
The ink that the Memjet printers are currently using is dye-based, similar to that used by the rest of the industry.

Silverbrook executives believe that they can design a printer that
holds five times as much ink – 50 ml – as a conventional print
cartridge, and sell for about $20 or less. How the company will
solve clogging problems – the bane of inkjet printers – hasn’t been
fully disclosed, LeCompte said.According to LeCompte, the technology
could be licensed to a struggling competitor in the inkjet arena,
allowing it to take on companies like Hewlett-Packard through
established sales channels. Silverbrook itself has filed 1,500 patents,
with 2,000 more pending.The first thing HP will do is look at all their
patents,” LeCompte said. “With 1,500 patents and 2,000 pending, they’re
going to be praying that they’re going to find some overlap. And there
probably will be areas in which they overlap one another. So there
probably will be some sort of cross-license…with some wheeling and
dealing going on.”Silverbrook Research is owned by Kai Silverbrook, who
runs a secretive research facility in Australia. About 300 employees
are focused on this one product alone. Like Bill Gates and other
technology entrepreneurs, Silverbrook is supposedly self-taught, and
never finished college.”[Silverbrook] has been focusing on this thing
for ten years,” LeCompte said. “My gut says this is going to work.”

[Author]

March 27, 2007 at 10:39 AM