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.

Popularity: 1%

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

We are not afraid of “laser” in laser printers, because it is highly unlikely one would get burnt with it. Yet, laser printer is the device that may be a source of “phantom menace”.

A group of Australian scientists revealed that office laser printers could be causing as much danger to the lung as cigarettes do. It is all a matter of ultra-fine particles contained in printer toner. Lidia Morawska, a professor from Queensland University of Technology and one of the study heads, comments on the discovery:

Ultra-fine particles are of most concern because they can penetrate deep into the lungs where they can pose a significant health threat. These particles are tiny like cigarette smoke particles and, when deep inside the lung, they do the same amount of damage. The health effects from inhaling ultra-fine particles depend on particle composition, but the results can range from respiratory irritation to more severe illness such as cardiovascular problems or cancer.

The study was conducted in a typical six-story office building and showed that level of particulates in the office was lower than outdoors during off hours. However, during business hours level of particulates rapidly rose up to 500%. Sitting in an office like this is like being outdoors by a busy road.Further investigation narrowed possible sources of excessive particulates emission to laser printers. Having figured out the source of menace, the scientists monitored 62 laser printers including, for most part, HPs with a small number of Canon, Ricoh, and Toshiba printer. The monitoring produced these results: 37 laser printers didn’t emit a thing, 17 printers had high level of emission, while the rest of printers stuck in between the two groups. Yet, no clear pattern was found of how emission level relates with different machine makes, models, etc.

However, it was determined that larger amount of pages printed, as well as density of text and graphics on the page, increases the particulates emission level, since more toner is used. The age of the laser toner cartridge affects both amount of hazardous particles produced and their average size. The older toner cartridge is, the fewer particles it emits. This makes it sensible to use remanufactured toner cartridges for your laser printer and to ventilate your office well during business hours.

Popularity: 2%

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!