Lomond, Oce, Fuji Xerox - что общего? Memjet приоткрывает завесу.

By Leon Spencer

Memjet is lifting the veil of secrecy around its groundbreaking technology, with the company revealing the game plan for its immediate future, including faster drivers, different inks and a new mechanical printhead in development that will compete with Piezo printers.

Following the company’s move to take on the Memjet-related research and development business in May this year from the highly secretive Silverbrook Research, Memjet’s US-based CEO, Len Lauer, says the company is now working to shrug off the guarded culture that was fostered under Sydney’s Silverbrook.

“We’re going to be more public about this company here in Sydney and not keep it as quiet as it has been. It’s just a different philosophy, that’s all. We want our employees to be proud of working for Memjet,” says Lauer, at the company’s Sydney offices in North Ryde.

Lauer says that the company took on about 5,000 Memjet-related patents from Silverbrook Research, after the Australian research company suffered a bitter legal stoush with majority shareholder, the George Kaiser Family Foundation earlier this year. The Californian company also took on about 300 staff from Silverbrook.

Now, with Silverbrook’s court case behind it, the company is working towards its next generations of ‘Angel’ printheads and the development of its mechanical printheads, which Lauer says will see it expand into new markets and partner with a plethora of new and varied press manufacturers.

“With the next generation of Angel printheads, we will very much extend the printhead life, and improve the print quality,” says Lauer (pictured). “We will start to look at pigmented inks, and then a few years later when we get to the mechanical head, that really opens up the industrial commercial markets.

“We will be able to print almost any ink on almost any substrate. Then we’re really starting to compete against the Piezo heads. Piezos are very, very good heads, but they’re very expensive,” he says. “What we have now is a classical inkjet-type thermal head, but with our mems-on-silicon approach, and not having to use the expensive Piezo crystal, we should be very disruptive in that market when we get to it with our mechanical heads, in three to four years.”

At present, the next leap in Memjet’s technology is being developed in the company’s Dublin facilities. Once its mechanical printhead passes through the development phase into commercialisation, it will allow Memjet to branch out into most sectors of the industry, including wide format and high-speed web, among others.

For the moment, however, the industry can expect to see faster speeds from the existing 70,000-nozzle, 60-page per minute, printheads, in a broadening array of configurations, allowing for some applications in commercial print and wide format.

In fact, at its Sydney office, the company now has on display what is essentially a wide-format printing module, featuring a five-printhead array known internally as ‘hammerhead,’ which can print at 32 inches per second. However, that speed looks set to increase soon as the company brings out its next generation of controllers. “By the second half of next year we’ll be able to run that press much faster,” says Lauer.

Lauer is optimistic about the company’s expansion into most other areas of the printing market in the near future, and by the time 2014 rolls around, the company hopes to see its printheads appearing in partners’ machines from all sectors. Already, it has signed partnership deals with Océ, Toshiba TEC, Delphax, Xante, Colordyne, Astro Machine Corporation, Fuji Xerox, Lomond, and the local Rapid Labels.

“In our portfolio, you have the office market, the labels market. We have hybrid, the hammerhead version that has five heads gets us into commercial markets, and then there’s wide format, we have extra width at five heads wide. High-end signage starts to burn a lot of ink, so those are very attractive markets,” says Lauer.