1,000ppm: You're kidding me!

Damian Koh | Nov 01, 2006

Well, we're not and neither are the folks from Flamingo Electronics. At Global Entrepolis @ Singapore, the company showed off its second prototype of a new printing technology that could blow away the competition.

Codenamed JeTrix, the new concept purportedly delivers a print speed of 1,000 pages per minute (ppm) compared with current inkjet speeds of approximately 30ppm. No, we didn't make a typo error here. Unlike conventional printheads that have to move back and forth across a page, this new printhead can be enlarged to the size of a sheet of paper, as CNET Asia learned from Moshe Einat, founder of Flamingo Electronics. Think of the printhead as an LCD monitor--instead of emitting pixels of light, the printhead gives out pixels of ink via 56,000 nozzles.

Einat sees many potential applications for this new printing technology but it would be targeted mainly at industries which require high-speed printing. But who's to stop them from dreaming? The animated duo, Einat and Nimrod Rospsha, CEO for Flamingo Electronics, see a day when laptops double as printers so you can print on-the-fly. Camera-phones are not spared, either. Shrink the printhead to the size of your handheld, take a picture, then print it out. Sweet.

It's not a bed of roses. For instance while it's good that the printhead can print so fast, there would be mechanical issues of how to move the media. Unlike offset printing which can output large volumes of a single page, this new technology can print large volumes of different pages, but this would require a new data protocol for sending the sheer amount of data. However, Einat and Rospsha are unfazed since there are current technologies that can address these issues and it is only a matter of integrating them.

The JeTrix project is currently still in the seeding stage, but with additional funding and product engineering, a first commercial printer employing this new printhead could see the light in two years. More information can be found on the company's Web site here.

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