HP earlier this week announced breakthroughs in printer ink, printer toner, and media technologies that allow customers to get color printing quality comparable to offset printing.

The list of the HP’s breakouts includes:

• ColorSphere Toner
• Dual Drop Volume Technology
• Enhanced ‘Low Melt’ Monochrome Toner
• ColorLok Media
• XL Inkjet Print Cartridges
• Simple Black range of cartridges
• Dual Pack LaserJet Cartridges

Now let us see what is what and who is who. (more…)

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Hello! Today we have some hi-tech news again, the “we found another use for inkjet printer” kind of news.

So, there is a company, FUJIFILM Dimatix, that supplies drop-on-demand inkjet printheads for industrial applications. The company recently announced that researchers at the Department of Chemistry at Colorado State University used its cartridge-based Dimatix Materials Printer (DMP) to devise a method of developing new materials for producing hydrogen from water and sunlight.

The researchers used a Materials Printer to do the necessary calculations and precisely print arrays of finely-graded compounds onto special transparent substrates.

The new method allowed the researchers to isolate a particular chemical compound that has potential for water photoelectrolysis. Water photoelectrolysis is a conversion of sunlight into an electrical current that divides water into hydrogen and oxygen. This process is critical for energy-efficient hydrogen production.

The printer uses the Dimatix Materials Cartridge that has 16 nozzles linearly spaced at 254 microns with typical drop sizes of 1 and 10 picoliters. These cartridges allowed the researchers to accurately determine individual droplet volumes of the compound gradients, the number of nozzles firing, the jetting waveform for individual nozzles and the frequency of nozzle firing. Such level of customization makes it a great printer, indeed.

The compound optimized during the research is made of three common elements – aluminum, cobalt and iron. The researchers hope that the method can be used to find new solar water splitting materials that are both functional and inexpensive.

As oil prices go up, discovery of new materials for the production of alternative fuels is very appealing.

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Here is another device from the family of “The World’s Mosts and Firsts”. This is a wide-format Solara ion inkjet printer by Gerber.

The printer can print on virtually any surface that is up 64 inches wide and up to 1 inch thick! When it comes to printing speed, the device covers up to 639 square feet per hour at a resolution of up to 1440 dpi on rigid and rollable media. Gerber Solara ion printer makes printouts that can last up to 3 years outdoors without lamination.

So, what actually make this printer world’s first? Of course, it’s the technologies behind it.

Solara ion printer is the first to use GerberCAT cationic inks that dry instantly and are ready to use right after printing. Besides, these inks feature unmatched adhesion on materials problematic for other ink jet printers such as textiles or even glass.

Next is Cold Fire Cure technology that allows printing on wider range of heat sensitive media such as plastic, vinyl, fabric, and paper based materials. Needless to say, the technology produces no volatile organic compounds, no odors, and no environmental ozone.

As you can see, this is no ordinary device you would buy home. Gerber says that the device is targeted at printing applications such as billboards, fleet graphics or vehicle wraps.

Up to date, there is no any exact information on the price of this printer. Gerber, however, mentioned that the Solara ion offers better performance than any other such printer on the market today for under $150,000.

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You may be pleased to know that Kyocera announced a development of the world fastest and industry widest drop-on-demand inkjet printhead.

The KJ4 Series printhead that was developed in cooperation with Brother is claimed to print at speeds of

• up to 200 m per minute at a resolution of 600×480 dpi
• up to 150 m per minute at 600×600 dpi.

They didn’t specify the width of a print produced at such speed, but it seems to be the width of the printhead ifself, that is 10 cm.

The printhead comprises a Kyocera-developed piezo actuator that accommodates 2,656 ink nozzles in a 108 mm-wide arrangement. The device dimensions are 200×25x58 mm.

The printhead is versatile and can use both water-based pigment and UV inks, delivering them in 4 to 20 picolitres droplets onto variety of media – from paper to fabric, film and plastic.

In performance test, two printheads used in Miyakoshi Printing Machinery MJP600 printers were able to achieved outputs of 1,000 A4 sheets per hour.

Commercial sales of the KJ4 Series printhead will start in April 2008, which means we’re going to see devices printing at light speed some 3-4 month later.

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One day you will get anything you want without going to local supermarket. The only thing you’d have to buy will be an inkjet printer. Using it, you will not just print images and text, but also get yourself other stuff for very day life.

The scientists have adopted the inkjet printer for printing electric circuits, artificial bones, blood vessels and body organs. Yet, inkjet printing proves versatile technology for creating other non-imaging products.

A Massachusetts, US-based company Konarka Technologies has announced that it has successfully manufactured solar cells using inkjet printing technology. Using the existing and very simple technologies of an office inkjet printer, Konarka has replaced ink with the solar cell material, and paper with a thin flexible sheet of plastic.

Here is how it works. The printhead of an inkjet printer deposits a solar cell material into a thin flexible plastic sheet. According to the company, the process creates solar cells which are almost as good as the silicon ones, created with more advanced technologies. The beauty of the new method is that it makes solar panel much cheaper, as it uses existing, generally accepted technology and requires no special clean premises.

Multiple colors can be added to “ink” to print patterns onto the cells, customizing them for different environments. Konarka says the technology may ultimately produce solar cells to generate energy from both sunlight and indoor light, and to supply lower power devices, like indoor or sensor applications.

The flexibility of the solar cells allows for a variety of locations where traditional solar panels could not be installed. Moreover, Rick Hess, president and CEO of Konarka, said in an interview to PopularMechanics.com that they “constantly receive calls from innovators who have read about the cells and propose unique—sometimes wild and crazy—concepts for the technology.”

For the moment, the inkjet printing is only feasible for large productions of solar cells. First consumer products are not likely to appear within next two years.

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Students of Georgia Institute of Technology has created a robot named PrintBot that can print out images of virtually unlimited sizes. On their site, Instructibles.com, they published a detailed step-by-step printer creation guide.

The PrintBot uses a printhead from an Epson inkjet printer (as it was expected to use it, the printhead, not Epson) and Talcum powder instead of inks. The printer is said to support wireless remote control and is based on iRobot Create, which, in turn, is analog of iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaning robot.

This device can perform on almost any horizontal faces, and the creators suggest using it for sidewalk painting and advertisement.

I wonder if this idea can be transformed for document printing. For instance, instead of paper running through the printer, a smal printing bot creates an image or a text line-by-line on a sheet of paper. Just like living pen. One could give it a ‘handwriting’ (as far as this term can be applied to a printer robot) style that could customly created and changed. Well, the sky is the limit to development of this idea.

In this video you can see the PrintBot at work:

Here is the results of its work (can’t make out what that is):

I really liked this bot. Hopefully, next thing they ‘teach’ it is to print on vertical faces and with use of paint.

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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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