At an event on March 10, 2008 in Tel Aviv, Hewlett-Packard offered a peek into future printing technologies, introducing a new inkjet printer that prints thousands of pages per minute and ink that retains its shine even when exposed to extreme elements.

HP’s water-based Latex Ink is specially formulated to embed in a surface and become part of a media print, said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president of HP’s graphics and imaging business. HP’s Latex Ink can withstand snow and rain and is useful for large-format media used on billboards and outdoor signs.

The company also launched the Inkjet Web Press printer, which can print up to 2,600 A4-sized color pages a minute at a cost of under US$0.01 per color page, Nigro said.

The Latex Ink includes a specially created formula, called latex polymer, that provides the print surface its durability and color, according to HP. Water-based ink ejected carries the latex polymer and pigment particles to the surface. The inks are 70 percent water and 30 percent of additives and other inks, HP said. The ink was developed by HP and HP Labs.

Unlaminated outdoor displays using the ink can last up to three years, while unlaminated in-window displays can last up to five years.

The printer cartridge uses recyclable material and the company has developed new recyclable substrates for the ink to make printing environmentally friendly, HP said. Other printing technology for large-format media include UV (ultraviolet) curable ink, which interacts with an ultraviolet light source to create a print.

HP also showed the Inkjet Web Press, a printer that prints up to 2,600 A4-sized color pages a minute. The printer will be able to print on pages up to 30 inches (76.2 centimeters) wide, Nigro said. It is targeted at replacing the printed pages coming from traditional offset presses.

A printing job with a traditional offset press takes hours and it’s not possible to print on demand. With a traditional offset press, a machine first creates a physical plate with the image etched on it, which is then sent to print. With the Inkjet Web Press platform, hitting the print button sends the image directly to a printer, making high-volume printing more productive by eliminating analog elements like a plate, Nigro said.

The printer is built around the Scalable Printing Technology (SPT) platform, which improves the quality of prints by spraying more ink on pages using thousands of nozzles on a single printhead. SPT is already in use on printers like HP’s Photosmart, Nigro said. HP introduced the Photosmart Minilab ml1000 inkjet printer earlier this year, which can print 4-by-6-inch photos as fast as 1,500 prints per hour.

Via www.cio.com

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Recently, we told you that Polaroid launched a new color mobile printer that uses no ink. Yes, there is a way to print images without a single drop of ink. The trick is in a special type of paper developend by Zink Imaging (”Zink” also stands for “zero ink”). The paper incorporates color crystals that are be activated by heat of printhead.

Now here is a video of a “dive” inside the paper, so that you can have a look at how the crystals work:

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The other day, Xerox Corporation announced the development of “non-contact flash fusing” - a major technology breakthrough in high-speed color printing. The innovation enables color xerographic continuous feed printers to achieve speeds of nearly 500 color pages per minute.

By flashing a high-intensity Xenon light more than 2,000 times per second, Xerox printers fuse the color toner at speeds that rival black-and-white continuous feed printing while creating high quality images.

In conventional toner-based printers, the entire paper is heated and the toner is pressure-rolled onto the paper. This limits print speeds to only 110 pages per minute and restricted printing on surfaces that have adhesives.

Xerox’s new flash fusing method depends on newly developed color toners, which melt and fuse the image entirely through the energy from the Xenon lamps, producing up to 650 images per minute in monochrome and 493 images per minute in full color.

In order for flash fusing to work, Xerox scientists had to change how cyan, yellow and magenta toners absorb energy from light. So they created color toners that contain special energy-absorbing material. This allows the individual color toners to absorb enough energy and fuse as fast as the black toner, which absorbs all light.

As a result, the toners are laid down in the order of their absorption rate - with the black at the bottom. As each toner is overlaid on the preceding toners, the energy builds with each flash providing just the right amount of light to fuse each color perfectly.

Flash fusing is the technological cornerstone of the Xerox 490/980 Color Continuous Feed Printing System, the fastest, full-color toner-based continuous feed device of its kind
as well as the newly announced 650/1300 Monochrome Continuous Feed printer and the 495 Monochrome Duplex Continuous Feed printer:

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One of the important aspects to think of when choosing a printer or buying a replacement cartridge, is how much ink or toner that cartridge actually contains. Amount of ink or toner in cartridge is usually called cartridge yield or page yield.

When you turn to see what the yield of a cartridge is, you will see a number of pages the cartridge is enough to print. For instance, IBM 28P2008 toner cartridge has a declared yield of 30,000 pages, while HP C6657AN ink cartridge capable of printing 400 pages. For a reason that is beyond me, ink cartridges are less capacious.

But printed pages differ from one another. One time you print a to-do list, next time it’s 10-page report.

For the purpose of cartridge yield measure, almost all printer manufacturers base their black ink/toner cartridge yields on 5% coverage. This means only 5% of the whole page is covered with ink or toner. 5% coverage implies basic type with no bold characters, no graphics and no pictures.

CMYK toners for color laser printers and copiers base their cartridges yields on 20% to 35% coverage (5% to 7% per color). In reality, if a document had a 100% fill, there would be 400% coverage. Tri-color inkjet/toner cartridges base their page yield on 15% coverage (5% per color).

Now take the last two paragraphs above and place them on a Letter-sized sheet of paper. Congratulations! You have created a sample 5% coverage page:

Let me ask you how often, if ever, you print pages like that? Who would ever need 400 or even 30,000 such pages?

Filling up the page, I managed to repeat the two paragraphs as many as 6 times, which gives us 30% coverage. This seems more like a commonly printed page:

I wonder why they don’t measure ink/toner cartridge yield in 30% coverage pages as more realistic. It’s clear that given a definite amount of ink in a cartridge, this would mean fewer pages to be printed and demonstrated.

On the other hand, I would know how many printed pages I’d have with maximum use of ink, i.e. I would be aware of the worst possible state of thing. Hence, if I print not that much text and graphics per page, I get more printed pages.

Wouldn’t it be more fair and realistic information for us, customers? I believe it would.

Whatever is the reason for using 5% coverage as industry standard, now you know what it is like and can approximate it for real-life prints.

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Briefly, LED (Light Emmitting Diode) technology allows for

• smaller and more reliable printing devices
• no ozone when printing
• higher imaging precision
• information security

To give it a detailed explanaition, I first need to tell what laser printing technology is.

Laser printing is a common name for printing using method of dry electrostatic transfer. This method intents that toner sticks to photosensitive drum in areas affected by light. Then toner is transferred to paper forming an image that is afterwards cured by pressure and heat. And it is electrostatics that actually transfers the toner to drum and from drum onto paper.

Traditionally, they used laser as a source of the light, but modern printers have an alternative - Light Emitting Diodes. Both light sources allow producing prints identical from customer point of view, but also have their peculiarities.

What are the advantages of LED printing technology?

1. Space effectiveness and absence of moving parts

Light source in LED printer is made up to thousands (2 500 to 10 000 pieces) of light emitting diodes assembled on printed circuit board just like most modern electronic components are done.

Since light emitting diodes are very tiny in size, they can be placed very densely in a LED printhead. Meanwhile, laser printers utilize a complex precision system of mirrors and a multifaceted prism (the one that makes hissing noises when printing). And it is generally acknowledged that the system with moving parts is less reliable than the one without such parts.

2. No ozone is produced

Ozone is very active chemical element that is useful for humans in small doses and hazardous if overdosed.

One of the household sources of ozone is printers and photocopiers. Previously these devices had corona wire, a wire that conducted high-voltage current. Contacting with this wire, the air got ionized and turned into ozone.

In modern printing and copying devices corona wire was replaced with a special roller and that spotted ozone emission. However, laser printers still have a source of ozone, it’s the laser beam. The beam goes a long way through mirrors and lens until it reaches the drum surface. On its way the beam electrifies the air and produce ozone, but truth be told, in smaller amounts than the corona wire.

The LED printer doesn’t have this drawback. The distance between LEDs of the printhead and the photodrum is so short there’s nothing to ionize. That is why LED printers are most environment friendly devices printing with toner.

3. Higher imaging precision

To explain this point, I’ll give some give technical background.

In the laser printer, the laser beam forms a line of image by running over the surface of photodrum. To reach the center of the surface and its edges, the laser beam has to cover shorter and longer ways respectively. Hence, the distance between adjacent dots is different. Besides, the beam lights upon the photodrum at an angle, which makes the dot not round but rather oval.

In the LED printer, there is a “personal” light emitting diode over every dot on the surface of the drum. Distances between diodes in the LED printhead are identical, and dots’ shape stays the same along the drum length. These characteristics provide high imaging precision in and center and ta the edges of a sheet.

Honestly speaking, this difference is only noticeable when printing fine details, like microprint.

4. Information security

The laser diode used in laser printers emits a sequence of light impulses which create an electrostatic image of the drum. Just like any other electronic device, laser diode emission is not limited too infrared radiation. It also produces radio signals, hence, working as a radio transmitter. Under modern level of technical development, these signals can be intercepted thus making it possible to restore what was printed of laser printer.

Just like is case of laser printers, devices build on LED technology such radio impulses too. However, due to huge number and simultaneous flashing of diodes in the working printhead, it is impossible to decipher what each diode emitted and to restore the image printed.

Sure, this is only important when you print some confidential or security sensitive documents. Your to-do list would not be of any interest to anyone, or would it?

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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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Previously on ”How to Detect and Fix Problems with Laser Monochrome Printing” we examined toner cartridge components and reviewed several possible reasons of printing problems. Today we shall pick up from where we left last time.

3. Magnetic Roller

This roller in HP printer is a metal cylinder covered with special coating with a magnetized bar inside. This part rarely gets out of order. For most part dirty print is caused by toner dosing.

The dirt “gives” a stripe to magnetic roller, thus, “taking away” a stripe from image on prints:

One of the signs of incorrect toner dosing is spilling of toner into the split between the metering blade and the magnetic roller:

Toner is spilled onto magnetic roller, which transfers the toner on photo drum. Photo drum, in turn, transfers the toner on paper, just like it should. This is how those needless stripes occur along the length of the page. The stripes may be black, if the split is wider than necessary for toner dosing, or they may be light, when the dosing is hindered due to dirt-clogged split.

In the office, anything may qualify as dirt, even a fly.

 Again, the problem is fixed by reassembling the cartridge or by replacing it with new.

4. Waste Toner Hopper

As we mentioned at the beginning, a cartridge contains a wiper blade that cleans unused toner. Such toner is collected into special container, waste hopper, and then is cleaned out during remanufacturing and refilling. Alas, sometimes low quality toner or carelessness of labor may lead to unpredictable results.

The prints clearly show that overrun waste hopper makes the toner spill over.

To fix this problem you should empty the waste hopper or replace the cartridge.

It’s worth mentioning that printing artifacts are not always due to faulty parts. For most users, a printer is a mere box that prints. However, for all technical service engineers printer is a piece of art, even if it’s a simple desktop monochrome printer. So, before blaming it all on printing consumables, one should make sure it is cartridge that’s guilty.

An exotic deviations in hardware of Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 1300: failed changes of thermofilm caused ripples around letters:

To determine which part of the printer is guilty of bad printing, it is necessary to have some knowledge of printing technologies and how they work.

Certainly, looking for most common cartridge breakings we can consider 5-7 more situations of bad printing. But it’s very often that the cartridge was used for 2-3 or even 10 times. Such a prolonged use results in critical worn-out and subsequent replacement of this and that parts of the cartridge. To avoid these unexpected troubles, use only quality printing consumables. The trick is not to get confused with everyday situation when looking for some extraordinary breaking:

This cartridge is simply running out of toner:

Cartridges won’t fail if you regularly replace them and use quality toner for refills. Remember, saving on savings may cost you a pretty penny.

That’s how prints should look like, regardless printer brand or model. They are all crisp and contrast, without a single mark. Making the right decision on printing supplies and refilling and remanufacturing company, will save time and money and spare you of headache. This is a fact proven by time and numerous companies.

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