Has an era of superfast colour printing come? Apr 21, 2007 Edgeline technology launched by HP spat out prints at 60 to 70 pages a minute
500 engineers create `paper-wide' print head First printers fuelled by ``Edgeline'' will come in May CUTTING EDGE: Costumed as the legendary Chinese female warrior Mulan, HP's Asia-Pacific vice-president Kelly Tan (right) launches the company's latest products into the printer battlefield, in Beijing recently. Business Manager Paul Lim holds up the `Edgeline' print head. Bangalore: Forget everything you ever learnt from the eternal inkjet-versus-laser printer debate. They have rewritten the rules, re-invented the inkjet and created new technology that will soon have printers churning graphics-rich pages - and glossy colour photos - at better than one-a-second. Nearly 10 years in the making and harnessing the efforts of over 500 engineers (including a team based in Bangalore), a new technology unveiled by Hewlett Packard promises better-than-laser speed and quality, using the `wet' printing process of inkjets, generally associated in the public mind with the first entry-level printers they can afford. But this is no ordinary inkjet. We know what the normal print head looks like - it's that replacement cartridge one buys when the ink runs out. The new technology known as Edgeline, extends the print head all the way across the carriage. This makes a huge difference: Instead of the head zipping to and fro across the paper width, spitting out ink to make up the image, it now stands still - and prints the full page width at one go. Only the paper moves forward - one line at a time. Regards Vishal Jain. This effectively halves the time to print an average page - and this correspondent got to operate the first-ever colour printers based on Edgeline technology (CM 8050 and CM8060) that were launched by HP in Beijing last week, as they spat out prints at 60 to 70 pages a minute - that is better than one a second. These are not your average home printers; they are floor-standing corporate models that look like small offset printing machines - only they are much cleverer. They come with a 10-inch touch-screen and a speaker system - so that if a malfunction occurs - if a paper gets jammed for example - a video display zooms to the location of the problem and a voice guides you till you rectify the problem. It is called AutoNav - and the idea seems to be, that you don't have to be an `ustad' or master printer to operate such complex production models. Other `cool' features include the ability to detect if a page downloaded from the Web uses colour only incidentally - like the blue of the web links and addresses - and then to print the page economically, at the higher monochrome speeds. Each of HP's Edgeline print head has over 10,000 separate nozzles - and about one-fifth of them are on `stand-by' ready to kick in if any nozzle gets clogged. The CM8060 actually uses five or six print heads to encompass the four colours. ``It's the best of both world's - colour and mono chrome,'' Kelly Tan, HP's vice-president in Asia-Pacific (Enterprise and Speciality Printing) told me - and clearly she sees Edgeline as a sort of `agni-asthra' or secret weapon, as the company prepares enter the battle in the corporate and high-end printing `maidan.' Which may why she leaped on to the stage, at the Beijing launch event last week, `dressed to kill,' in costume as Mulan, China's legendary female warrior, who in the fifth century AD rode to battle, disguised as a man when her father was killed... much like our own Jhansi ki Rani. The backdrop was an appropriately macho quotation from Sun Tzu's military classic ``The Art of War.'' The Edgeline-fuelled printers will hit the Indian market next month - but even if you could afford it, you couldn't buy one. HP plans to offer it only in a pay-by-use service model to corporate users - for now. All it's promising is a minimum 30 per cent saving in printing costs over comparable work. The rest of us may have to wait some months - or years - before Edgeline's dizzy speeds come to our `janata' models. Meanwhile, watch out for self-service photo printing kiosks - HP isn't saying so, but these are likely to be the first mass consumer applications of this zippy new printer technology. Regards, Vishal Jain Ph : 080-41140564 Website : http://vishal.hello.googlepages.com To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
