At an international conference in Prague, Australia’s Silverbrook Research announced a new inkjet printing technology which promised to be five to ten times faster than inkjet printers on the market today, yet still offer cost-effective printing solutions.
Silverbrook’s Memjet technology packs an astonishing number of ink nozzles into its print heads: each driver chip is just 2 cm across yet contains 6,400 ink nozzles, and Silverbrook has aligned these in series to create a single print head the width of an entire page. Unlike conventional inkjet printers—which move a printhead back and forth across a page on a control bar—the Memjet print head doesn’t move: instead, it sprays ink as paper moves continuously under the printhead. The Memjet print heads offer five color channels, and the printing system calculates some 900 million drops per second while controlling the firing of all the ink nozzles.
