Solid Ink Printers from Xerox Launched
Xerox Corporation had given enough clues in the past year and a half to indicate the arrival of their new printers based on solid ink technology. The first printer born off the technology, ColorQube 9200 is touted as an economical breakthrough for the price of print it offers. Ironically, the printer itself is set to cost over £10,000.
The solid ink technology was acquired by Xerox from Tektronix way back in 2001 for half a billion pounds. It leverages upon a new composition that includes a waxy crayon-like substance which gets melted and sprayed onto a spinning drum that deposits the ink on a sheet of paper. Energy consumption is expected to be relatively more than toner laser printers as melting of ink requires additional energy.
Xerox claims that ColourQube 9200 offers a total savings of 62% of all its prints. The figures were put out after a thorough lab testing that compared the print costs of this printer with others in the market.
The ink cubes shown the figure are the toner replacements. They are required to be replaced after 55,000 prints. The printer is claimed to print at a print range of 30 – 85 pages per minute. Sounds quite unrealistic though, but cannot confirm nor deny unless we get our hands on them.
About the author:
Abhinav has been blogging about printing and related technologies on CreativeCloud for several years. He is also a project manager for a large technology company.
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