'Astonishing' new inkjet technology – more details revealed

Update Mar 21: Silverbrook has now officially announced the Memjet printing technology. See our latest article for a new high-quality video, and news on when products are expected to become available.

Radical new inkjet printing technology with a “price/performance ratio that is off the charts” is about to be unleashed on the printer industry, according to analysts who have seen prototypes. The revelation casts light on one of the printer industry's greatest mysteries, and one of the world's most secretive companies, Silverbrook Research.

A $200 desktop printer with a color printing speed of 60 A4 pages per minute is just one of the revolutionary new devices promised by Silverbrook, a company which holds more than 1400 patents, but has never released a product. Analysts from leading printer market research firm, Lyra Research Inc, showed this video of the prototype Memjet inkjet printer today, and say they have personally examined it and verified that it is real.

They believe the new technology will have a dramatic impact on the printing and imaging market. “This thing is gigantic, we've been in this business for 20 years and I've never seen something as mind boggling,” said Lyra president, Charles LeCompte.

Please refer to Texyt.com's earlier article on Silverbrook Research and its Memjet technology for further background information, and a look at some of Silverbrook's patents. See also our new article which looks at Memjet's print quality, intellectual property issues, and competition from HP's Edgeline.

Silverbrook Research was founded in 1994 by inventor Kia Silverbrook, former director of Canon's Australian R&D center. The Sydney-based company has 300 employees, 75 per cent with graduate degrees according to Lyra. Silverbrook Research has occupied itself almost solely with research into inkjet printing for thirteen years, without releasing any products.

Silverbrook will make a formal announcement of the new technology on March 21. The company does not intend to sell printers itself, Lyra staff said. Instead, Silverbrook will license the Memjet technology and distribute components, ink and consumables through subsidiaries.

As well as printing technology, Silverbrook is working on a wide range of applications for that technology, according to Lyra. These range from a prototype miniature color printer designed to be built into mobile phones and other mobile devices, to design concepts for huge commercial printing presses using the Memjet print heads to print newspapers, magazines, advertising, books.

Low printing cost claimed

Silverbrook estimates printing costs for the basic desktop printer at less than $0.02 per black and white page, and less than $0.06 for a color page with 20 percent coverage.

The majority of existing inkjet printers use ink cartridges with a capacity of about 10ml, and prices of $10 to $20. Silverbrook's A4 desktop printer's individual color ink cartridges hold 50ml of ink, and will sell for less than $20 each, the company forecasts.

"Silverbrook expect costs of ink and media supplies will be pushing new lows. They're not looking to subsidize their costs with high ink prices, instead they want more of a balance," says Steve Hoffenberg, Lyra's director of consumer imaging research

The cartridges will incorporate a 'quality assurance' chip which uses 160bit encryption. The main function of this appears to to prevent after market refills or cloning of its ink cartridges.

Other products at an advanced stage of development include a small photo printer for printing snapshots (see the reference design on the right). Again, this is claimed to be much faster than anything else on the market, with a speed of 2 seconds per page, compared to about one minute per page for existing home photo printers. This has a target retail price of $150, and a cost per print of $0.10 to $0.20.

The extremely high speed of Silverbrook's printers is partly a result of their 'pagewidth' format. Unlike a conventional inkjet, the printhead spans the full width of the page and does not move. The A4 desktop printer's printhead is 8 inches wide and contains 70,400 ink nozzles. This photograph shows a tiny section of the surface of the print head - each of the small white circles is a single ink nozzle.

The ink nozzles are spaced 1600 to the inch on the the printhead, which is made up of four-inch sections built using a semiconductor fabrication process. The tiny nozzles can fire out ink droplets smaller than one picoliter (one millionth of a millionth of a liter).

Lyra expects Silverbrook's inventions to overturn the printing industry. "We see numerous markets that are likely to be impacted by this technology," says Steve Hoffenberg. Among the many sectors that could be affected, he says, are home and office printing, retail photos, portable devices, and graphic arts.

"There are lots of different markets where this can fit in. In every market where we believe they have competitive hardware, the price performance ratio is off the charts compared to what else is out there," says Hoffenberg.

Lyra's researchers believe major changes are likely in the printer industry, which is currently dominated by just four companies: Canon, HP, Epson and Lexmark. "They hold most of the patents related to inkjet technology for products which are on the market," says Hoffenberg.

Printer industry cracked open

Silverbrook's new printing innovations, and its decision to license them to others, could level the playing field and allow many new companies into the closed printer market, Hoffenberg predicts. "In one fell swoop, a whole new set of competitors will have the ability to bring inkjet desktop printers and other products to market.."

"We don't know which companies Memjet and Silverbrook are working with, so we're purely speculating here, but we expect there will be a lot of interest on the part of computer makers; companies like Dell or Lenovo or even Apple. On the consumer electronics side you can imagine Sony, for example. In the photo industry, companies like Fuji might be a candidate. There are also the office equipment manufacturers, everyone from Xerox to Ricoh, etcetera. And we also have the possibility that the existing printer manufacturers may want to adopt some of the Memjet technology."

Bookmark Texyt and come back tomorrow for our upcoming exclusive article with comments on the prototype Memjet printers' print quality, from people who have seen them, and also a comparison with HP's new EdgeLine printing technology - and why analysts think Memjet could beat HP.

Want to know more now? Read our earlier article about Silverbrook and its Memjet technology. See also our new feature which looks at Memjet's print quality, intellectual property issues, and competition from HP's Edgeline.