HP unveils printing technology for high-end office market

SAN FRANCISCO--Hewlett-Packard's newest ink-based printing technology, HP Edgeline, will be built into printers geared toward the high-end office market, the company announced Tuesday. The technology was first introduced last spring in in-store retail photo-printing kiosks.

"It's ink-based printing for huge-volume workloads," said Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of the HP Imaging and Printing Group, as he introduced the technology at a press conference in downtown San Francisco. The technology is aimed at companies that print hundreds of thousands or even millions of brochures or direct mailings.

HP will begin incorporating the patented technology into some business printers in spring 2007. Edgeline technology refers to HP printers constructed so that the print heads are laid in wide arrays, or side by side, to stretch across a whole page. Instead of the print heads moving and squirting ink onto a page like most inkjet printers, with Edgeline, the paper will move while the print heads remain stationary, and the job can be completed in just one or two passes.

"It's four times faster than anything we've done before," Gary Cutler, vice president of digital printing technologies at HP, said in an interview following the press event. And because the print heads are motionless, that amounts to more accurate ink placement and better image quality, he added.

Joshi said printers with Edgeline technology will also dispense smaller drops of ink at a rate of 1.8 billion per second. Previously, HP's best was in the "low hundreds of millions" of drops per second, according to Cutler.

The design is cheaper to build and more reliable because there are fewer moving parts, Hatem Mostafa, senior vice president of inkjet systems said in an interview.

Between now and 2009, there's about $30 billion worth of business in the retail, industrial and high-volume office printing markets that HP hopes to grab, Cutler said.

[fred dunn]

stInkJets...damned if you do and damned....

if you don't print because the inkjet head is going to clog and the ink get to viscous if you don't print enough. On the flip side they cost a fortune to resupply.
InkJet used to be the biggest scam as they would almost give the printer away so they could lock you in on the supplies.
HP has taken that strategy one step further and is now using the same tactics in their lower-end LaserJet line including the All-In-Ones where you get 2500 copies at 5% coverage (give me a break) and the cartridge costs the same or more than the cartridges for the workgroup printers that deliver 10,000 to 20,000 copies.
Moral of this story, don't buy an InkJet unless you ABSOLUTELY have to have color and can't take it to a photo kiosk and always check on the price of consumables BEFORE purchasing a printer of any kind.