Xerox gave a sneak peek Thursday at its cured gel ink for digital printers that works on a large variety of materials from foil to super-slick plastic to cardboard.
Xerox's cured gel ink
(Credit: Xerox)Xerox's ink, previewed at the print industry trade show Drupa in Germany, is aimed at taking a bite out of the estimated $400 billion offset printing market.
The cured gel ink, with its peanut butter-like consistency, is heated up and becomes a thick liquid, similar to motor oil. The liquid squeezes through the print heads and onto a printing surface, such as a piece of paper, foil or plastic. As the liquid cools, it reverts back to a peanut butter-like consistency and is then shot with a pulse of ultraviolet light to harden the ink.
"Today digital systems shine in many applications, while offset presses are selected for others. The ability to print on nearly any surface will bring a world of new applications within the reach of digital printers," Steve Hoover, director of the Xerox Research Center, said in a statement.
The ink is currently in the research mode and no timetable is available for when it may hit the market, said Bill McKee, a Xerox spokesman. But he noted: "When we introduce something at a commercial trade show, we're committed to offering it to the market."
Currently, the challenges in getting the cured gel ink to market comes down to having the ink react accordingly, no matter what type of surface it's printed on, whether it's a cardboard box or a glossy magazine, said Jim Larson, Xerox Inkjet program manager.
Xerox officially added five new models to its line of Phaser laser printers today, and I had a chance to speak with a product manager over at Xerox to get the scoop on the new product offering (Phaser 3100, 3250, 3635, 3600, and 5500).
While none of these new printers include built-in wireless, a feature that's been growing in popularity (Xerox sells a separate wireless network adapter for the 3600 series), we're still excited to get a few of these MFPs into the lab for some heavy-duty testing. Let's take a peek at some of the models you'll be seeing soon:
(Credit:
Xerox)
- $350
- Multifunction laser printer with unique ID copy
- OCR scanning
- Full QWERTY keyboard
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Xerox)
- $350
- Single function monolaser printer for small workgroups
- Built-in autoduplexer
- PostScript 3 and PCL 6 compatible
- Network ready
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Xerox)
- $750
- Network ready monolaser printer
- Optional high-capacity paper trays
- Autodocument paper feeder
- 128 MB expandable memory
Think of it as the future of today's paper.
The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and parent company Xerox are experimenting with a type of paper and a complementary printer that would produce documents that fade away after 16 to 24 hours. A restaurant, for instance, could print its daily specials on a piece of paper, attach the pieces of paper to menus, and then collect the sheets of then-blank paper in the morning to run through the printer again.
How does it work? The paper is coated with photosensitive chemicals that turn dark when hit with UV light.
Users don't have to wait for the paper to fade either. By running it through the special printer made for this paper, the printer will erase the old image before putting the new one on.
The paper and printer could hit the market in a few years.
The same sheets of paper can be run through the printer hundreds of time, according to tests conducted by Xerox, said Eric Shrader, area manager, energy systems, device hardware laboratory at Xerox. Typically, the paper isn't reusable only when it gets damaged or crumpled.
The idea is to cut the amount of energy consumed in making paper and printing. Like refurbished PC makers have noted, reusing an item consumes a lot less power than making a new one, or even recycling one.
It takes about 204,000 joules to make a sheet of paper, Shrader said. That's about the same amount of power required to run a 60-watt light bulb for an hour, he added. Recycling that same sheet of paper takes about 114,000 joules.
Printing a conventional 8x11.5 sheet of paper takes about 2,000 joules, he said.
Reusable paper takes a lot less effort. It only takes 1,000 joules to print an image on one of Xerox's reusable sheets of paper, and that's if you use the printer to erase the image. If you let the image fade naturally, it only takes about 100 joules to print. It takes energy to produce the special paper, but the energy consumed in recycling fades out.
"Being able to reuse paper is a big energy win," Shrader said.
This piece of paper is blank, but about eight hours ago it said, 'Reusable Paper. Xerox Parc Inside Innovation at Xerox' in block purple letters.
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET Networks)Energy has become a major focus of research at PARC over the last three years. The lab, which Xerox opened in the '70s, helped create the PC, inkjet printing, and Ethernet networking. Xerox, however, didn't commercialize a lot of these inventions successfully; instead, companies like Apple borrowed liberally from the lab to great effect. PARC now functions relatively independently, coming up with inventions to license to others.
Not every document is right for reusable paper. Presentations and legal contracts probably need to be printed on something more permanent. But lunch menus, daily work summaries, and memos from meetings can all potentially take advantage of this. Xerox says that 44.5 percent of documents are printed for one-time use and 25 percent of all documents printed get recycled the same day. (Lyra Research estimates that 15.2 trillion pages get printed worldwide a year, a figure that will grow 30 percent over the next 10 years.)
"Think of the Google map you printed to get here," Shrader said. "Thirty years ago, we said the future was paperless."
The paper and the printer will be a little bit more expensive than their conventional counterparts. The photosensitive molecule embedded in the paper is proprietary.
While the paper shown in the photo is yellow with purple ink that appeared later, Xerox has produced white paper and can come up with a variety of ink colors. The company, however, has used yellow paper as an example so that focus groups know what sheets to reuse and which to recycle.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--It looks and feels like a square, yellow crayon.
But it's actually a lot more sophisticated than that. It's ink in solid form (aptly called "solid ink") made of a polymeric resin, and Xerox researchers are using it, combined with advances in print head technology to make a greener printer.
Solid ink before it is melted and jetted onto paper in a printer.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)Solid ink is different from what's used in the average desktop printer. Instead of buying cartridges filled with liquid ink, which are inserted into small print heads that race back and forth to transfer an image to paper, solid ink is melted, then dripped into a single drum that's as wide as a regular sheet of paper.
The image is then transferred with heat and pressure to paper. It takes about 10 revolutions of the drum to transfer the image, which is then hardened and ejected from the printer.
So how is it greener? Liquid ink requires a lot more packaging--the cartridge and the box it comes in. Xerox says solid ink outputs 90 percent less waste than liquid ink, and saves up to 260 pounds of discarded cartridges and their packaging over the life of a single desktop printer.
It also doesn't require any water or solvent to dry the ink. It does, however, require more energy to heat thick ink to melt it. (The melting point is between 70 degrees and 100 degrees Celsius.) Xerox says it continues to tinker with insulation and the ink's melting point to squeeze more energy efficiency out of every solid ink printer.
Another way researchers are looking to improve the tech's green cred is through the print heads themselves.
Smaller, modular print heads distribute melted solid ink.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)By making the print head smaller than the standard 8.5-inch-wide one used in solid ink printing, the new modular print heads can scale to fit multiple kinds of printers using different ink and different media. Xerox says it can output 300 dpi (dots per inch) and the cost of each drop is improved greatly. Despite the improvements, new print heads do mean needing to buy a new printer to take advantage of the technology.
Xerox says this will be available in consumer desktop printers within a year.
(Credit:
Crave Asia)
Because Fuji Xerox Printers is better known in office circles than in the home, we didn't think we'd have much to write about its new DocuPrint C1110B laser printer. After all, most of its stuff are specific for a demanding office environment. The C1110B can output at 12ppm (color), start up in 16 seconds and kick one page out the barrel in 12. It also has a decently deep media tray that can store half a ream's worth of A4-sized paper (250 sheets) and accommodate an assortment of paperweights.
Then we saw the price. At $310, it's cheap--for a Fuji Xerox. And another $104 or so let's you upgrade to the C1110 (without the "B"). The B-less version includes 640MB memory, Ethernet connectivity, and compatibility with more print languages. Of course, laser toners don't come cheap: A black toner would set you back by about $70 and around $90 for cyan, magenta, and yellow.
(Source: Crave Asia)
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Fuji Xerox)
OK, so maybe wood engraving isn't exactly the kind of advancement in desktop printers that we've all been waiting for. This one is esoteric as well, but there are probably a few more people who will find it a bit more useful: It translates while making copies.
Fuji Xerox has developed a prototype that can scan Japanese text and print it out in translated English, Chinese or Korean without changing the layout of the original page. "Fuji Xerox's secret lies in networking the unnamed copier to a dedicated translation server and combining this with algorithms that can distinguish between text, drawings and lines for maintaining page layouts," according to Digital Tokyo World.
The translation works in the opposite direction too. But we pray that they won't use the same translators as those who work for Iron Chef.
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