Brother International has announced its DCP-9000 Series of Digital Color Laser Copier/Printers. The DCP-9000 Series is designed for small office and small workgroups, and includes DCP-9040CN as a base model and the DCP-9045CDN as an enhanced version.

Brother markets the series as copier-printers, they can equally be considered printers with copying and scanning features added. If you view them as multifunction all-in-one printers with printing, copying, and scanning, you won’t be wrong either.

General specification of the DCP-9000 Series are the following. Print speeds reach up to 21 pages per minute for both color and monochrome at resolution of up to 2,400 by 600 dpi. Copying speeds are a bit lower — up to 17 copies per minute in both color and monochrome. Copy zoom range varies from 25 percent to 400 percent in 1-percent increments.

The two copier/printers have built-in Ethernet network connectivity. They can scan in color at an optical resolution of up to 1,200 by 2,400 dpi. As for the paper input capacity, the devices provide a standard 300-sheet (includes a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray).

Besides, the Brother DCP-9040CN includes a 35-page automatic document feeder, a two-line LCD display, and 64MB standard memory.

The enhanced model of Brother DCP-9045CDN

• has a built-in auto duplex for two-sided printing, copying and scanning;
• comes with a larger, 50-sheet automatic document feeder (a 500-sheet letter/legal paper tray is available as an option;
• supports USB Direct Interface, to print and scan PDF and JPEG files directly from a USB flash memory drive without a PC;
• supports printing from PictBridge-compatible cameras;
• features a five-line LCD display; 128MB memory standard.

Information for the environment conscious: unlike the base model, the DCP-9045CDN is Energy Star certified.

Both DCP-9040CN and DCP-9045CDN support standard or high-yield replacement toners to choose from. Standard-yield black toner cartridge yields of 2,500 pages, while high-yield black cartridge has a yield of 5,000. Three standard color toner cartridges will be available with yields of 1,500 pages, and high-yield versions would yield 4,000 pages.The DCP-9040CN is available this month for estimated price of $600, and DCP-9045CDN will be available in December for approximately $700.

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You’ve, probably, heard or seen those compact photo printers that promise photo-lab quality printing at home. You may even own one. These standalone printers are designed so you can create images without help of computer, though, personally, I don’t think this is a good idea.

Anyway, those printers have tiny (I know, manufacturers call them large) LCD-display that is supposed to let you preview the snapshots before print and perform some minor photo editing. Never took this feature seriously, because nothing compares to full-size display.

I suppose the same idea came to both Epson and Philips, too. The two companies together have developed a new product called PhotoViewer. Using PhotoViewer you can (guess what?) view photos on your TV screen and then print the ones you liked on a printer. Despite your expectations, PhotoViewer can be connected to any TV-set, however, the printer would be Epson, precisely Epson PictureMate PM240.

 The PhotoViewer is actually a black glossy box with memory cards slots on front panel. The device can be directly connected to the television with the included audio / video cables. Epson printer is plugged in through USB port. By the way, a remote control is also included, so you can zoom in and out and rotate images, and pause the slideshow from your coach.

The new contraption can view photos in full 1080i high-definition television. You can download photos from a memory card, digital camera, mobile phone or PDA, as well as from USB hard drives and memory stick. One of the coolest features of PhotoViewer is ability to play MP3’s during the slideshow.

Viewing picture on the big screen is fun, but consider this. When you’d see an image in details, thanks to the new device, the chances are you may want to change it. Say, retouch the wrinkles or remove a pimple. Admit it we all want to look better on photos.

By the way, the PhotoViewer is priced €179, which is about $265. Do you think it’s worth the money?

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California-based company has developed a technology that may enable cheap electronic microchips and large displays.

As time passed, inkjet printing technology finds application in areas having little or nothing to do with producing texts, graphics or photos. Inkjet printers have been successfully adopted into bioengineering (for printing tissues of human body) and electronics (for printing electronic circuits). These are two industries that require high precision in manipulation with ultra-fine particles, just what inkjet technology can do. Now let’s get to the point.

A California-based company named Kovio announced a new process that can be used for printing memory and logic chips transistors. This technology is particularly convenient as it uses commercial printing equipment such as inkjet printers, which make the production of microchips cheap and easy.

Currently, Kovio’s method uses several types of commercial printers, including inkjet models. Also, the company has developed a variety of inks for printing different electric circuits. The estimations are system requires only 5% of the materials and a 25% of the electrical power used in conventional chip-making processes.

For now, conventional microchips are more advanced then those made using printing technologies. Printed chips are still larger and usually have much less transistors (thousands compared to hundreds of millions). However, low production cost of the printer microchips makes them applicable for a large range of common objects. Thus, the first products made by Kovio are likely to be disposable smart cards for public transportation.

The feature of Kovio’s development is the use of inorganic semiconducting materials instead of organic materials. Despite a slightly higher price, the inorganic transistors perform 100 to 1,000 times better than organic transistors.

The higher performance of inorganic devices may also prove useful for organic LED-based displays. Printing techniques are very well suited for distributing transistors over large areas, and that makes them suitable for making really large displays that could cover, say, a wall.

Hopefully, this technology proves viable, because, personally, I could wait a couple of years for cheap wall-sized display to appear in my room.

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Recent study show customers have no basis for comparison when buying printers, which results in $6 billion overpay on ink every year.

The American Consumer Institute released a new white paper entitled “Inkjet Prices, Printing Costs and Consumer Welfare” disclosing pricing strategies adopted within the inkjet industry. This is the first document made by public organization (we don’t consider numerous articles on the topic in magazines and sites by independent authors).

Inkjet printers are usually under-priced or even sell in the red to make them more appealing for purchase. However, the manufacturers make up the profit on overpriced ink, and consumers are left with no choice and spend hundreds of extra dollars to operate the printers. The printer ink is currently one of the most expensive liquids in the world. The price of it can be compared with that of the world’s finest champagne, gasoline and most luxury fragrances.

Currently, there’s no standardized printer ink unit pricing, such as cents per printed page. In this situation, customers at the shop have no information about real printing costs. They buy cartridges without knowing how much ink is in them or how many pages one cartridge will print. The lowest price cannot serve as the rule of thumb, because very often the lowest priced cartridges have much less ink.

The paper also suggests that adoption of a form of truth-in-labeling would allow customers to compare each printer’s cost-of-ink per printed page. The paper concludes that competition in the inkjet printer and ink sectors would be much more intense if consumers were made aware of the cost implications of their printer choices. Better information means lower costs for consumers.

I believe this is a good start. If more public organizations begin informing consumers on the issues and thus affecting the manufacturers, the situation with overpriced printer ink may really change for the better.

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The inkjet printer has come a long way from a supplementary project inside a hi-tech corporation to most popular computer printing device.

If you own a printer at home, the chances are good it’s an inkjet printer. Nowadays, inkjet printers are the most popular printing device for home and small office use, but it has not always been like that.

From the 1960s into the 1980s computer printing was dominated by dot-matrix printers. Some of them can still found around. Unfortunately, dot-matrix still used an impact method for printing (pretty much like typewriters), so the problem of noise and speed limitations remained. With word processing getting more and more important, a fast, quiet, high-quality printer became required.

In the early 1980s, introduction of the laser printer met that need. By eliminating the need for physical impact against a ribbon, laser printers achieved much higher speeds and were able to work in almost silence. As personal computers grew popular during the 1980s, laser printers became the only acceptable choice for “letter-quality” printing, regardless the cost of several thousand dollars.

However, the laser printer’s reign was eventually overtaken by a technology developed at the Hewlett-Packard. HP, along with Epson and Canon, can claim a substantial share of credit for the development of the modern inkjet, and we will consider the history of inkjets from the HP’s point of view.

Funny thing is, HP’s invention was not originally intended for personal computers, since when the project began in the late 1970s, there were no such things. Instead, HP was looking for a new printing mechanism for portable, battery-powered calculators, its most profitable consumer product.

One of the company’s main goals in its printer project was to reduce the power consumption of its printing calculators. At the time, some calculators output their results by striking a type bar against an inked ribbon. Others had thermal print heads, consisting of a small column of resistors that could be electrically heated and pressed against a thermally sensitive paper or ribbon. Thermal printers required a special kind of paper and had problems with the type fading over time. They also used a lot of battery power.

Printer research had been a part of HP’s calculator development work since the beginning. In the early 1970s, the engineers at HP’s advanced research laboratory in Palo Alto, California designed the HP-35 also built a prototype “pocket plotter” to output graphs. Later HP engineers in San Diego and in Andover, Massachusetts, developed this prototype into a practical device they called a “grit wheel” plotter, which was used with computers and graphing instruments.

Building on this success, in 1978 managers of HP’s Corvallis, Oregon, facility started a project to apply the grit-wheel idea to calculator plotters and later, in the fall of 1979, the very inkjet project started.

In HP’s central advanced-research laboratory in Palo Alto, an engineer named John Vaught demonstrated the use of thermal heating to eject droplets of ink through a tiny orifice to print text. The idea of inkjet printing was not new in itself, but Vaught’s mechanism was the first to look suitable for use in a mass-produced consumer product.

The inkjet project got a big boost when its research staff hires Niels Nielsen, a very free-spirited mechanical engineer with less than a year’s experience. Nielsen began by examining the existing technologies. A key goal was to find a simpler way to spray the ink out. In 1979, Siemens introduced the printer that used a piezo-electric device to spit the ink out.
In the Siemens printer, an electric current was applied to piezoelectric crystals, causing them to exert a force on the ink in a tube and eject it through a hole onto the paper. This method was smart and reliable, but it was not suited for a low-cost, disposable item, while the idea of using thermal heating looked promising for mass production.

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Tonejet, a developer of digital printing process, has announced its revolutionary extra-wide printhead. The 172mm-wide head, claimed to be the world’s widest integral printhead has been developed in cooperation with a number of partners.

The system is based on electrostatic drop-on-demand deposition technology that doesn’t have nozzles, but uses a very fine jet of concentrated ink to create a robust, thin and flexible layer that renders unnecessary the labels on curved or uneven surfaces. The new printhead allos to create high-quality designs onto virtually any type of absorbing or non-absorbing substrate at high speed.

Here is an example of a image printed on a feather!

The technology is going to find its first application in packaging, with printed products due to hit the market in the course of the coming year. Tonejet said that the main reason they chose packaging is because it’s a large market and many packaging companies want to apply digital technology.

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HP claimed it’s giving up its camera manufacturing business. Instead the company plans to focus more resources on Print 2.0 – the new web-centered printing concept.

However, the company is going to maintain the brand and now is looking for an OEM partner that will design, build and distribute digital cameras under HP label.

HP wants to accelerate its investment in Print 2.0 initiative, which the company unveiled in May at its Imaging and Printing Conference in New York. According to HP, 53 trillion pages will be printed in 2010, creating a market valued at more than $296 billion. Most part of those pages is to be printed from the Web. HP’s Print 2.0 strategy is focused on using Web-based services to get a significant share of the growing number of digital pages printed each year.

This move of HP seems very logical, I mean who ever bought HP digital cameras?

Purchasing future revenues, HP also keeps up with current developments. Researchers from Palo Alto have created toner particles that are chemically grown. Usually toner powder is produced by mechanically grounding carbon block, but HP’s spherical monochrome toner is vat-grown.

Such chemical origination of toner has some advantages over regular toner. HP claims chemical growth of toner results in a consistently round toner particle. Even round particles allows for a more efficient printing process leading to a smaller cartridge. HP also claims that printer toner would be applied on paper more precisely because of the evenness of this new toner particle.

Let’s turn from Goliath to David. A start-up company from Cambridge, Inkski, has developed a very fast printing method. The new technology called “Lilo”, Light Initiated Liquid Offset, can deliver up to 400,000 drops per second from each channel. This is about 20 times faster than a general inkjet print head can produce.

Lilo works like this. Drops of ink are formed in a regular array on a rapidly rotating cylinder, using a photonic trigger to eject drops. The tiny drops can be held on the cylinder by surface tension balanced against the centrifugal force tending to throw them off. A laser beam releases drops from the cylinder.

The Lilo technology uses conventional inks and offers nearly similar per page costs as standard methods of digital printing, except pages can be printer much faster. The technology employs no nozzles, so there should be no clogging and smudging.

Hope to see new printer built using this technology.

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