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.
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.
Printing documents and tossing them out almost immediately is a common ritual in the workplace--one that's not so environmentally friendly. According to a recent study by Xerox, as much as 40 percent of what's printed in an office is thrown away or into the recycling bin on a daily basis. And if it's pitched to a blue bin, it still takes energy to recycle that paper.
Xerox, of course, has a technology solution to the problem. In recent months, the printing company came out with a "green" paper that promises to cut the environmental footprint of traditional paper-making methods. Xerox's paper, called Xerox high yield business paper, uses half as many trees as regular paper and requires less water, chemicals and fuel to produce. The printed matter is also 10 percent lighter than typical papers. It's designed for the high-volume printing like in newspaper publishing, but it's not for archiving. The pages will turn yellow over time.
Still, in an interview with Xerox CTO Sophie Vandebroek on Wednesday, it would seem that people need to get over their love of paper first. No shocker, Xerox found in its study that people like the touch and feel of freshly printed pulp.
The lives of office file clerks may get a little easier if Xerox delivers on its promise of new smart-paper technology.
Researchers from the company's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on Thursday announced three new technologies that augment digital and paper documents.
First is the hybrid categorizer, software that uses computer vision and other machine learning techniques to understand text and general images on a digital page. Then it links the text and images so the document can be categorized. For example, an insurance company could use the software to digitally file a document containing an image of a car into an auto claims folder, vs. one for home claims. The software would automatically complete the task without the help of a file clerk.
The second in Xerox's software cadre deals with mining pages for sensitive information. The technology, called "intelligent redaction," is a content detection tool that can encrypt sensitive sections or paragraphs of a digital document, or it can automatically remove confidential data from the page. For example, if a hospital needs to send a patient's medical folder to another doctor as part of a legal case, the technology could encrypt the information about the patient that needs to remain private.
Continuing on the spy movie theme, Xerox also announced a new security feature for paper documents. Its so-called infrared specialty printing technology lets customers create and embed a hologram onto a physical piece of paper to prevent copying. An infrared light source can authenticate the document by revealing its hidden text. Xerox CTO Sophie Vandebroek said the technology could be used for birth certificates, store coupons and movie tickets.
"There's an amazing opportunity to leverage these technology across many markets," Vandebroek said.
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