1000 page per minute printer

(via Engadget)

I am always skeptical of extreme claims such as this recent announcement from 2 Israeli researchers, but I am also hopeful that this will come about.

The innovative printer head created by engineers Moshe Einat and Nissim Einat works in a similar way as a liquid crystal display (LCD). But while an LCD emits tiny pixels of light, collectively forming the picture on your laptop or television, their print head emits pixels of ink. Their basic design is small, but it can be reproduced and the copies combined into one large printer head.

“Unlike traditional printer heads that are small and have to move back and forth across the page, our print head can be enlarged into one that is the size of a sheet of paper or larger. One can think of it as an ‘ink-emitting screen’,” Moshe Einat told PhysOrg.com. “This means it could print one page almost instantly, and hundreds of pages in just seconds.”

Traditional disclaimers apply here. The printer is not expected to be commercially available for another 2 years. In 2 years, we’ll hear that the technology is turning out to be harder to develope than originally expected, and it will be another 2 years before super high speed printers are available. A couple years after that, we’ll start seeing shipping products, but while fast, they will run at 1/10th the predicted speeds. At least, that’s what the skeptic in me sees.

It really is neat technology. It’s just now a question of can this be made and shipped anytime soon? I just know that most big breakthroughs in tech tend to be harder to deliver than originally expected.

[tags]1000 page per minute printer, Super high speed home printers on the horizon[/tags]