Xerox Goes Green by Melting Ink
Posted on Apr 28, 08 10:37 PM PDT
Xerox, a household name when it comes to photocopy machines, have managed to utilize a polymeric resin known as "solid ink", when combined with technological advances found in print head technology which results in a greener printer. Solid ink is melted and dripped into a single drum as wide as a standard sheet of paper, where the image will then be transferred via heat and pressure onto the paper. It takes approximately 10 drum revolutions to transfer the image which will then harden and be ejected from the printer. This solid ink impacts less negatively on the environment compared to regular cartridges as it requires less packaging and outputs 90% less waste than liquid ink, helping one save up to 260 pounds of discarded cartridges as well as their packaging over the lifetime of an average desktop printer.
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By PrinterGeek , 29/04/08 6:01 AM (CommentID #657037)
The technology of solid ink printing is nothing new. In fact, it's not even really all that new to Xerox.
When Tektronix (the original developers of the solid ink technology) decided to follow HP's lead and split off the printing division from their instrument division, they took the opposite tack from HP, keeping the Tektronix name for the instruments and instead of spinning off a new company and coming up with a snazzy new name like Agilent (HP's instrument division), they just sold the printing division off to Xerox.
The solid ink printers are nice, but they do have some down sides. The solid ink produces a lot of waste when the printer is power cycled, the printed ink has a tactile quality to it that some might not like, especially if printing large documents, etc. The solid ink itself is also VERY expensive.
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