Following in the steps of Kodak (well, kind of in the steps), Fujifilm has said they will enter the market for inkjet printers and print cartridges.

As the market for non-digital photography products continues to decline, companies such as Kodak and Fujifilm are working to reinvent themselves and regain the profits they once earned. On Friday (4/6/04) Fujifilm said they would enter the market for industrial inkjet printers to spur the sales of ink cartridges.

Their goal is to obtain sales of $169 million of the new printers and ink by 2009-2010. Fujifilm proposes to buy the printers from two other manufacturers and the ink from a third manufacturer (that it acquired in 2005). They will then market the printers and cartridges together.

It is expected that Fujifilm will launch their printers and ink cartridges in the U.S. this month.

The inkjet market is becoming quite these days.

It’s Good Friday, so that means is it time for a good story. And, we’ve got a good one for you.

The printer industry has evolved quickly over the last few years, but the claims of an Australian company could advance inkjet printer technology even faster than we have seen in the past. They claim to have a printer that can print at a rate of 2 pages per second. They also claim that their printer will have affordable ink cartridges (under $20 for a 50ml ink cartridge). Forget about the print speed, the price of the cartridges is the real advance in technology.

Silverbrook Research, a company with over 1,400 patents, is claiming that it is finally ready to reveal its “Memjet” inkjet printer technology. This printer has been in the making for 10 years. The technology is similar to HP’s Edgeline Technology in that it uses a single printhead that spans the width of a standard 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper.

Here is where the story gets GOOD!

Silverbrook is detailing the technology in a paper that will cost the reader $2,995.00 to access. That’s right, just under $3,000 to read it. Anyone got few spare thousand dollars lying around?

You can read some free information at the Memjet Technology website. You can even view a video of this speedy little printer. Click the link under the A4 Document Printer.

Enjoy!

Here’s are a few items for thought. They originally appeared in a post a week or so ago, but were buried near the bottom of the post. In hindsight, they are pretty interesting quotes. So, here they are again.

“Ink is actually one of the most costly substances on earth — if you were to fill up your car with ink instead of gas, it would cost $150,000 to fill up your car.”

“It certainly feels that way (expensive) when I go round to Office Depot or wherever and end up spending $25 for a little package of ink that’s no bigger than a cigarette packet.”

“Printers are sold relatively cheaply, but the consumer is then stuck buying ink at the equivalent of $2,000 a liter.”

“If everybody used Greenprint it would save somewhere between 20 and 30 million trees a year. Billions of tons of CO2, if it was on every computer, it would be the equivalent of taking millions of cars off the road annually.”

We all know printer ink is expensive, but it has become somewhat of a necessity in our lives. Our best hope is to get someone to pay for our ink for us. Our second best hope is to research the alternatives. There are alternatives to buying the expensive manufacturer brand cartridges. If you have not already, take a minute to check them out.

Thanks to our friends at Greenprint for their thoughts.

A cartridge test standard? I guess this is just a general interest story for those interested in how much ink is really in a printer cartridge. Why is this important? Because it leads directly to the eternal question, “how many pages can I print with my cartridge?” which then determines how often you will have to buy printer cartridges, and how much it will cost to keep your printer full of ink.

As of now, it is up to manufacturer to disclose the amount of ink, usually number of milliliters (ml), that is inside a cartridge. The manufacturer then takes this number and uses a “magic” algorithm to determine how many pages of print you will get out of the cartridge. Most interesting is that these calculations are always based on 5% page coverage. So, here’s some quick math for you:

If you figure that a standard page is 8.5 x 11 inches, a single page will give you 93.5 square inches of paper to print on. Five percent of 93.5 is about 4.7 square inches. Now measure out a space that is 4.7 square inches on your piece of paper. If you print in that area only you should be able to print the number of pages the cartridge manufacturer suggests you can. Not likely, huh? (DISCLAIMER: I am not a mathematician, so if my math is wrong please correct me).

Back in February, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published a standard for measuring the number of pages an ink cartridge will produce. The standard was subsequently backed by HP, Canon, and Kodak. Standard ISO/IEC 24711:2006, which has yet to be approved, establishes how ink and toner cartridges are to be tested. The standard cites how many cartridges must be tested to determine an average lifetime (nine of them), what constitutes a standard test document (five pages printed with default printer settings) and the kind of machine on which the cartridge must be tested.

An interesting aside to the story, Kodak (a supported of this standard) has just released its own line of inkjet printers and inkjet printer cartridges and claims that they will be selling their printer cartridges at a price that is 50% less than other printer cartridge manufacturers. But, Kodak has yet to disclose how many milliliters of ink are in their cartridges. Until we know how much ink is inside one of their cartridges, we can’t really believe their price claim of 50% less.

We’ll keep you posted as we find out more.

Yahoo! released a Digital Camera Preview for spring 2007. I found it to be a very interesting read. And man, technology has come quite a long way since I purchased my last digital camera 2 years ago.

Prior to that we had our original digital camera for 3 years, but while on the beach the camera got swept up by a wave. That was the end of that one. Sand, water, and digital cameras just don’t mix. At that point we purchased an Olympus C-765 UltraZoom (Awesome camera!). A few weeks later my wife and I were canoing (actually we were canoe racing another couple with the camera on board) and got to paddling a little to hard. You can guess what happened - tipped the canoe. There went digital camera #2. So, we headed out and bought the exact same camera again. The only consolation was that we paid $150 dollars less than we had the first time (thank you Amazon).

Okay, now that I’ve got my embarrassing “tech toy destruction” story out of the way (I will leave the story about driving away with the iPod on the truck of the car for later), maybe someone will share one of theirs. Now, back to the point . . .

We were talking about advances in technology. The story lists the features you can get on a $300 camera these days. Mind you, I paid $300 twice for my Olympus and got most of these, but not the 7-8 megapixels. I was psyched to get 4 megapixels!

• 7-8 megapixels
• Large view screen (at least 2.5 inches)
• 4x to 6x optical zoom
• ISO speed of at least 800, more likely 1600
• Automatic and manual settings
• Image stabilization
• The ability to print and share photos directly from the camera
• Use of Wi-Fi
• GPS positioning options
• Face detection

Here are the models that Yahoo! expects to cause the biggest buzz:

1. Samsung NV11
2. Olympus Stylus 770 SW
3. GE Gizmodo
4. Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W100
5. Kodak EasyShare Z712
6. Kodak EasyShare Z885
7. Canon A570IS

So, take a read. All of these sound like really good cameras. Kind of makes me wish I was in the market for one. I guess if I get desperate I’ll get the canoe out.

A company in Portland, OR has created a software program that will allow us to use less paper and less printer ink.

We all know the routine. Quite often you go to print and you get a blank page, or a page with a minimal amount of text on it (not enough to be useful, but enough to relegate to the recycle bin or trash).

Often the printed pages look nothing like the document you created and you have to trash the print out and go back to reformatting your pages. That is followed by another round of printing that may or not be what you want it to be. A lot of paper gets wasted this way.

Or, maybe what you are printing is full of large multi colored ads and all you want is the black and white text. Your color print cartridge just got a workout for no reason.

Well, Portland based GreenPrint (www.printgreener.com) has developed software that will help save some trees as well as saving printer ink.

Here’s how it works:

The GreenPrint software eliminates unwanted pages saving paper, ink, money, and millions of trees by allowing you to see exactly what your print will look like before it goes to your printer. Think of it as an advanced version of print preview. You get to see exactly how your document will print and then make any changes you want before printing. Don’t like the colored URL’s - change them. Not happy with the page breaks - move them. Want to remove some text - do it. Then print. Here are some features:

• Highlight and remove unwanted pages
• Print overview - you decide what stays and what goes
• PDF creator - create PDF’s with a single click
• Track the number of pages and money saved

The folks at GreenPrint also provided some enlightening stats:

• “Ink is actually one of the most costly substances on earth — if you were to fill up your car with ink instead of gas, it would cost $150,000 to fill up your car.”
• “It certainly feels that way (expensive) when I go round to Office Depot or wherever and end up spending $25 for a little package of ink that’s no bigger than a cigarette packet.”
• “Printers are sold relatively cheaply, but the consumer is then stuck buying ink at the equivalent of $2,000 a liter.”
• “If everybody used Greenprint it would save somewhere between 20 and 30 million trees a year. Billions of tons of CO2, if it was on every computer, it would be the equivalent of taking millions of cars off the road annually.”

And a little something extra. GreenPrint is sponsoring the Million Tree March. For every copy of GreenPrint sold before March 31, they will plant a tree. If they reach 500,000 trees before March 31, they will match every tree planted with an additional tree. Find out more.

I was pretty shocked upon reading this one. Pretty bold, Best Buy. One of my blog counterparts, who normally has nothing good to say about Best Buy would have a hay day with this one.

Best Buy, like many other retailers offer a price matching program. Meaning, if you see the exact same item for the same price at another store they will honor that price. Best Buy takes it a step further and says if you see an item for a lower price on their web site they will honor it in the store. So, you pay lower Internet price. This is where it gets interesting.

Customers began to find themselves confused when checking the in-store computers to make sure that the Best Buy web site price was not lower than the in-store price. They found that the prices they were viewing on the computers in the store were not quite as low as they remembered seeing on the computers at home. Put simply, web prices were somehow higher when shopping online inside a Best Buy store.

What was going on? Well, come to find out, Best Buy was using an in-store Intranet. It was a private version that looked almost the same as their public Internet web site. There was only one difference - prices were higher. A secret investigation conducted by a reporter from the Hartford Courant gives more detail.

Best Buy has admitted to the secret in-store site, and is being investigated by the state of Connecticut. But, Best Buy says that the pricing issues were a mistake (not intentionally higher) and they never meant to mislead anyone.

For, now do your research at home and make sure to take your price comparison printouts with you.

Not necessarily related, but an interesting idea. Kind of a follow up to our organ printing a post a while back.

Can computers make life or death decisions? Researchers say that a simple mathematical formula could predict how people would want to be treated in dire medical situations as accurately as their loved ones could. Findings say that computers could help doctors by acting as surrogate decision-makers to better estimate the wishes of people in a coma.

This begs the question, how well can human surrogates predict what the patient’s wishes might be? According to the article, a review of 16 studies found that surrogates got it right only 68% of the time. Can a computer do any better?

Researchers think so. By analyzing data from the general US population about attitudes towards medical researchers believe they can create an algorithm to replace the human surrogate. Their analysis suggested that most people want life-saving treatment if there is at least a 1% chance that following the intervention they would have the ability to reason, remember and communicate. If there is less than a 1% chance, people generally say they would choose not to have the treatment. The researchers then put their own work to the test and found that their computer surrogates predicted the patient’s wishes more accurately — 78% of the time.

Think about this for a minute. Should computers be allowed to do something like this? Mr. Orwell says let the debate begin!

(Source: newscientiest.com)

Good question! And, as printer cartridge technology continues to advance picoliters are going to become more important. Put simply, a picoliter is a very, very, very, very, very small drop of ink. But, for those that require a more formal definition, our friends at Whatis.com give this:

A picoliter is a trillionth (one millionth of a millionth, or 10 to the -12th power) of a liter, which can be represented numerically as 0.000000000001/liter. The prefix pico denotes a trillionth part, just as the prefix nano denotes a billionth part. Measurements on the scale of nanoliters and picoliters are used in microfluidics, the branch of nanotechnology dealing with extremely low volumes of liquids. Strictly speaking, when measurements such as picoliters, picometers, and picoseconds are involved, the correct term is the less familiar picotechnology.

Among the possible applications of liquid measured to such tiny volumes is the lab-on-a-chip, a device about as big as a shirt button that performs laboratory functions on a microchip platform. One such device, the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer, uses reagents (chemical species that change as a result of a chemical reaction) in picoliter volumes moving through microchannels etched into a glass chip. A more common use for picoliter-scale volumes is in printers; inkjet printers typically use ink droplets that measure somewhere between 2 and 25 picoliters, with smaller droplets enabling higher resolution images.

So, next time you are out and about and want to wow your friends with your knowledge of microfluidics and nanotechnology, bust this one out on them.

(Source: Whatis.com)

You’ve waited a long time for this day. You’ve purchased it and upgraded, but now your printer won’t work. This is the plight of many Windows Vista users.

Windows released its much anticipated Vista operating system a few weeks ago.

Here’s what’s happening . . . When you upgrade to a new operating system the printer drivers that used to run your old computer hardware remain the same (they are not upgraded). The new operating system then tries to use them, but they are not compatible with the new system, are not recognized, and therefore cannot be used. If you are using drivers written for an older operating system you will need to upgrade to the latest driver, making sure that it was written for the new operating system you are running. In some cases there is no such thing. In other cases there is, but you can’t always guarantee your printer will work as well as it did with the old drivers and the old operating system.

The best place to find a new driver (if it is available) is on your printer manufacturer’s web site. You can then download the drive and install it on your computer.

Windows Vista has caught a lot of heat because of people’s printers not working after installing. In addition, there have been many rumors that many printer manufacturers are not going to update printer drivers to be compatible with Vista if the printer model is more than a few years old. What does this mean? Well, it means that if you have a printer without and updated driver you have two choices:

1) Revert back to the old operating system and drivers

2) Buy a new printer that has drivers that work with Windows Vista

The driver issues do not only apply to printers, they also apply to other hardware peripherals.