Memjet: Is ink printing industry enjoying its last days?

Once I was sitting late at night in front of my computer and couldn’t believe my eyes. Lyra Research organized its regular webcast program and it was a new inkjet printer that was the highlight of the presentation. It’s hard to believe but it was producing a color page every second! HM...The inscription under the video screen said – “inkjet printer with Memjet technology”.

According to the researchers, Memjet technology is a revolution in the industry. They also promised to offer the technology worldwide till the end of 2007. Besides, the price for a printer will be rather small: an A4-format printer will cost no more than $200.

An inside look at the Memjet technology

First of all it is the printhead that allows such great speed, the size of which coincides with the width of A4 paper. So, while printing the printhead is not supposed to move either to the left or to the right, it works steadily, without any unnecessary movements. The width of the printhead is 21,3 cm and it comprises 70,400 nozzles. In the picture below you can see the structure of the printhead under the microscope.

You can see this printer in work with your own eyes:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996259363769507120&hl=en

And it means more than 1600 nozzles per 1'' (inch)! As you can see from the picture the nozzles are set in a line. Within only one path through the nozzles of 1'' of the printhead there appear 2,5 million tiny ink dots on the paper. In other words, these small apertures are as if “shooting” ink drops the size of which is less than 1 picolitre (a picolitre equals to one millionth of a litre). Such technology allows high quality printing with everything that should come with it: contrast, consistency and so on. Such tiny size of an ink drop is surely an advantage as it takes ink less than 1 second to get dry. And this is one of the key factors for quick printing because there is no risk to smear the edges.

The printhead consists of the 4"-size parts. Each of them is built into a 20 mm block produced with the help of the technology used in production of the ordinary graphic CPUs and chips.

Can it be a hoax?

An inkjet specialist may already be rubbing his hands eager to prove the incapacity of the technology, ready to reveal the whole mystification. Let us try to find the grain of truth in it.

To begin with, the authoritative Lyra Research’s support brings about the idea that this technology is extremely interesting to manufacturers of the ink printing industry. Its appearance on the market can be followed by radical changes in the market structure.

Secondly, Silverbrook Research Company is known in the industry circles as an established and recognized private research center. For the last 10 years the company patented more than 3000 innovations and inventions. In the influential PatentBoard rating [www.patentboard.com] Silverbrook Research occupies the 8th honorable place in the list of the companies that introduced a lot of innovations in the information sphere in 2006. In this list Silverbrook Research is accompanied by such brands as IBM, HP, Canon, Microsoft Corp. The very idea of proving the company a liar will be perceived by others as an insult.

Input of the information

According to the manufacturers, they produce prints with the resolution of 1600 dpi at the speed of 60 pages per minute. But specialists are well aware of the fact that the printing speed is not the key technological parameter. For quick printing it is necessary to feed the printer with a huge amount of image data. To keep up to the above mentioned speed and resolution the Memjet printers have to absorb more than 200 Megabits per second for an A4 or letter-size page. If the data flow is lower the printer cannot be that quick as it will have to wait for the data to proceed. What is the way to solve this problem?

The solution has found its shape in the SoPEC chip (Small office home office Print Engine Controller). By its nature it is a small computer on a chip with 32 bit Leon Spark CPU core, 2,5 megabytes DRAM and USB 2.0 controllers. According to specialists, the SoPEC chip may be produced for the company somewhere in South Korea or Taiwan basing on a special design. According to the company’s site www.memjet.com, this chip can control up to 900 million ink drops per second. Besides, the chip is characterized by a few interesting qualities: it decompresses .jpg images, more than that two or more chips can be linked together to work on the same print job. The smart chip also finds the way to decompress each part of the document to print in accordance with its type – whether it is a text or an image.

Clogged ink nozzles

Any specialist that has ever worked with the modern inkjet printheads will exclaim: “Whatever! As soon as the nozzles are clogged - your printing wonder will be gone like a soap bubble.” And it makes sense – clogged ink nozzles are by far the most widespread disease of current inkjets. If the printer doesn’t get used often enough, the ink dries and sets hard inside the nozzles making them “dead”. Such dead nozzles can usually be traced in the prints, this lowering the quality of the image and cannot but irritate the user. If you try to clean up the nozzles yourself you may just spoil the whole cartridge.

Memjet creation finds solutions for all the troubles. It goes without saying that that sophisticated SoPEC chip plays its role perfectly but it is not only the chip that contributes to the achievement of the common goal. The printhead structure itself is dealing with the problem.

To avoid the situation when ink dries in nozzles the manufacture suggests using all them. In other words when you print a color image there will be red and yellow drops in every blue one. But at the resolution of 1600 dpi a human eye cannot perceive them. Why? I will finish this sentence with a dot that will comprise 100 drops (100 picoliters) from the Memjet printhead. I think the answer suggests itself. It is no wastefulness since the size of the drop is extremely small. According to the manufacturer, it will take you to print 15,000 pages to spend just 1 milliliter of inks.

Besides the all above mentioned, the manufacturer has patented the nozzle clearing system for its printhead. So, it makes us think that such risk does exist! To do it justice, Silverbrook Research doesn’t deny that it is impossible. The idea of the system is to use compressed air. This pump can be also used to push moistened air into ink caps to prevent them from drying.

To make sure that everything works all right the ubiquitous SoPEC chip contributes to it, too. This smart hardware can discover dead nozzles and regulate the work making its “neighbors” stand the racket. Thus, they have to work twice as much compensating for the dead one. Let’s revise this figure again – there are 1600 nozzles on one square inch of the printhead. The SoPEC chip is able to guarantee the prints of excellent quality even if 5% of all the nozzles are dead.
Thirst for a prize

No sooner had the Memjet technology appeared than they started guessing who will finally be the lucky one to get it. HP and Dell are said to be extremely interested to acquire it. Others on the contrary stake on Apple that will not lose the opportunity to grab its piece of the pie, i.e. to get its market share of the ink printing industry that is undoubtedly much easier to do when you have the Memjet technology patent in your pocket.

I think that Memjet technology is completely real and can work all right. But it is only the beginning – you can never know if world famous vendors will let it enter the market.

How about reman?

The printers work on 5 monochrome cartridges. Each of them possesses 50 ml ink. There is a 160 bit chip on every cartridge that makes it impossible to refill it. This is the official information. All experts say remanufacturing is impossible because of the sophisticated chip.

In addition, since there are only a few prototypes for photo printing, A4/letter size printing and label printing, it excludes the possibility to recycle Memjet cartridges for now.