10 Up-and-Coming Technologies That Will Change Printing

The end of the year is traditionally a time for making predictions, so what better time to talk about technologies that will change printing? Most of the technologies covered here already exist in at least some printers, but they deserve to be widely copi

One way to speed up inkjets is to make the print head the full width of the page. Hewlett-Packard does this with its Edgeline printers, reaching 70 pages per minute, and so do prototype printers using Silverbrook Researchs Memjet technology, at 60 pages

HPs Edgeline printers offer another trick to speed printing: a drum. When an image needs more than one pass of the print head, a way to get additional passes is to stop the page from advancing and let the print head take another pass. A better choice is

Another way to increase inkjet speed, with or without pagewide print heads, is to add nozzles. Most Canon printers today, for example, have print heads with a few thousand nozzles. Prototype letter-size Memjet printers with pagewide print heads have 70,40

Most people dont think of ink as a technology, but its largely the improvements in inks—along with improvements in paper—that have dramatically increased the permanence of inkjet photos, the range of colors inkjets can print and more. Ink tech

One of the perennial problems with inkjets, and one key negative for inkjets for office use, is how easily the inks smudge. HP and International Paper have developed a ColorLok technology, already available in some papers, that reduces smudging by speedin

Lasers that can print lots of pages per minute can also leave you waiting for a single-page document as the printer wakes up from power-save mode—metaphorically yawning and stretching while the fuser warms up. More and more lasers are coming to marke

With multifunction devices, waiting for the scanner to warm up before copying or scanning is at least as annoying as waiting for fusers to warm up. Some vendors are starting to use LEDs as their light source, which eliminates warm-up time and offers insta

Xeroxs solid-ink printers melt solid blocks of ink, spray the ink on a drum and then roll the drum against a piece of paper to transfer the ink like an offset printing press. The speed has generally been a match for slow lasers. In early 2007, Xerox post

Printing electronics-literally, printing things like memory, displays, microphones, speakers and even batteries, often with inkjet printers—is an alternative production tool that more and more companies are taking seriously. Lawrence Gasman, principa

3-D printers, also called rapid prototypers, are already being used, for example, by dentists to build crowns while a patient waits in the office and by architects to build models of their designs. As prices continue to drop, the applications should widen

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