Silverbrook’s Memjet Printer Technology

Silverbrook Research unveils new inkjet printer technology that analysts believe will revolutionize the imaging industry.
“The technology will be available in products in late 2007, starting with a 100mm printhead that will be used for home and retail photo printing as well as label printing devices. An A4/Letter printhead will be available in 2008 with many different components and technology improvements planned for the future,” the company announced.

The cheap A4 desktop printer with a color printing speed of 60 pages per minute is just one of the revolutionary new devices promised by Silverbrook, a company which holds more than 1400 patents, but has never released a product.

Other products that will be made possible by the new technology are a $150, desktop photo printer that prints 30 photos per minute. This is more than 10 times faster than all existing desktop products, and 2 to 3 times faster than the speediest competitor, HP’s new Edgeline printer, which is not available in a retail product for ordinary consumers.

HP’s competing printer costs $16,000..
While Edgeline could be the closest competitor to Memjet in terms of speed, it appears to be far more expensive. In fact, a spare paper tray for the HP edgeline printer currently costs more than $2,000 - ten times the $200 analysts say is possible for Silverbrook’s desktop inkjet printer.

Silverbrook’s assault on the market
In almost 3500 patent applications over the past decade, Silverbrook has described an incredible array of potential products. These include a full colour printer module small enough to fit into a mobile phone, digital camera or even into handheld games like the Sony PSP or Nintendo DS.

Radical new technology

The ultra fast speed of the printers is partly due to their ‘pagewidth’ format. Unlike conventional inkjets, the printhead spans the full width of the paper and does not need to shuttle from side to side. The A4 or letter-size desktop printer’s printhead is a full 8 inches (21.3 cm) wide and contains 70,400 ink nozzles. This microscope photo shows a tiny section of the print head - each of the small white circles is a single ink nozzle.

The ink nozzles are arranged in lines, with 1600 nozzles per inch. These can produce more than 2.5 million ink dots per square inch of paper in a single pass. (The screen you are reading this story on has approximately 10,000 dots per square inch). These tiny nozzles can fire out ink droplets smaller than one picoliter (one millionth of a millionth of a liter). This produces tremendously sharp prints, say analysts.

The very small size of the ink droplets is important, because it helps the ink dry in less than a second. This is a critical factor in high speed printing without smudging.
The printhead is made up in four-inch units. These are themselves assembled from smaller pieces, 20 mm long, which are built using a semiconductor fabrication process, similar to that used to make CPUs and graphics chips. The photograph on the right, shows an 8-inch silicon wafer on which these 20 mm print head sections are visible.

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.

Currently, the Memjet technology tops out at 1,600 × 1,600 dots per inch; photo-quality printing can be handled at 30 pages per minute, while everyday document printing can reach speeds of 60 pages per minute.

Silverbrook doesn’t plan to enter the printer manufacturing business; instead, the company wants to license the technology to other manufacturers. Silverbrook will make its money making print heads and control systems, selling ink, and licensing its designs.

Silverbrook plans to offer reference designs for printers in a number of different formats, and says the technology can be easily scaled up to large-format printing.