Xerox is back on the track with its solid ink technology

According to New York Times, Xerox is planning to breathe life in its solid ink printers by adding high-volume color printers to its product list by the end of this spring. After years of research, Xerox will release the first in a new series of large machines this month that it claims will change the economics of printing large volumes of color documents at offices.

Unlike traditional laser printers that use cartridges of powdery, sometimes messy toner, the revamped products rely on hunks of ink that remain solid at room temperature and then melt when heated.

“This is something they have been working on for forever and a day,” said Brian Bissett, the editor of the MFP Report, a publication about office printers and copiers. “It does have the potential to be fairly important.”
Traditionally, printer makers have charged big corporate customers a per-page fee for printing services: up to 8 cents a page for a color document and less than 2 cents a page for black-and-white.

Xerox and its main competitors, Canon and Ricoh, typically bill customers for a color page if there is any pigment on it, whether it’s a full-color replica of a slide from a presentation or a page that just has a colorful company logo and mostly black text.
Because of the higher cost, only about 15 percent of the more than two trillion documents printed every year in offices worldwide use color.

“This isn’t because people don’t like color but because there have been lots of barriers to color,” said Ursula M. Burns, the president of Xerox. “The last barrier is that it’s expensive.”

With its new ColorQube solid ink systems, Xerox says it can pull the average cost of color documents down to about 3 cents a page. A portion of the price break comes from better tracking of how much color is used on a page. But the principal breakthrough with the solid ink technology stems from the overall simplicity of the machine’s innards. Solid ink machines need about one-third as many parts as laser printers, which require various mechanisms to fuse toner onto paper that must be replaced over time, adding materials and services costs.

And instead of putting clunky cartridges of toner into the printers, customers just pop in the sticks of ink. Once that ink runs out, another stick goes in, and there’s nothing that needs to be thrown away or recycled. Over all, Xerox claims that it takes about 272 pounds of material to produce one million pages with a solid ink machine versus 965 pounds of material with a competing laser product.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Key words: Xerox, solid inks, large-scale printers