The ancient art of printing gets a game changer

Memjet, the printer design company headed by former Qualcomm COO Len Lauer, made its first major partnership announcements at CES 2011 yesterday, and its staggeringly fast inkjet printers will be brought to market by Lenovo in China, WEP in India, and Kpowerscience in Taiwan. North America and Europe are sure to follow.

Why should you care about Memjet? Because most of the big announcements coming from printer companies in recent years have revolved around advances in printer communication and broadened functionality. It isn't often that a disruptive technology comes along and results in a different kind of printer.

That's what Memjet is showing at CES, an inkjet printer that is capable of between 60 and 70 pages per minute because of its unique printhead design.

Just for the sake of comparison, HP's high-end OfficeJet Pro printers max out at 36 pages per minute, and the machines utilize a print head that slides back and forth to get the ink on the page. Memjet has a single printhead that is the width of the paper tray, that utilizes more than 70,000 color jets to ink a page.

Memjet is a printer and printhead design company, and licenses its patented technology to manufacturers, so when this type of printer is released to consumers, it will carry a more recognizable brand and is not likely to look like the models on display at CES.

Unfortunately, the company's representatives couldn't come forward with a timeline for manufacturing partnerships in the U.S, but we were assured that they are in the works, and we'll be seeing these super fast printers on the market soon.