Ausjet Inkjet & Laser Supplies Blog

Below is some thoughts and news from the CEFIX Conference and Tradeshow :


LED Laser Printers design

The advantage LED laser printers have over traditional laser printers is really the LPH (LED Print head). The LPH uses a self focussing lens and has no moving parts. The LPH rated reliability is 50,000 hours! This is one of the reasons Okidata offer a 3 year warranty as standard. They claim it's the best warranty available in the market place. It's been stated that with LPH technology higher resolutions and smaller dot sizes are possible .

A Mr Bobo Wang who works for Aetas technology has made it his life long goal to make the smallest highest quality printer. He believes he has achieved this and has further increased the technology and quality of the LPH. The other big advantage is that the cost of the LPH had been reduced to about $10 USD to manufacture.

Fuji-Xerox has also developed new advances with the technology and the word was that they will be licensing their technology to other manufacturers. Is seems the LED is the future replacement for laser printer because of lower manufacturing costs and an increase in quality and reliable. It is strange that the other big players have not signed up to LED which begs the question what do the OEM printer manufacturers have up their sleeves? What cards are they still yet to play? Time will tell.

Managed Print Services (MPS)

The buzz word is still 'managed print services' but at the conference they asked who had fully implemented this service. Their was only 5 hands out of about 200 attendees. The problem I have found over the years is that nobody is correctly explaining how it all works. It basically has come out of the copier industry and the most important word is 'service'. It incorporates a cost per page system but that is only half of what its all about. It's a system where you negotiate with the customer a cost per page based on the printers they have, this includes servicing the printer and providing the consumables.

Its a contract you agree with the customer and might include bringing in new printers or rearranging printers. It's not something you can get into overnight but the advantages can be tremendous for those that invest in it. It is typically aimed at multiple printer installations. From all accounts the OEM's are streets ahead in implementing this strategy. Those resellers that have customers will multiple installation should seriously consider how they are going to protect their business by beating the OEM's to the punch.

Worldwide General Printing Declining but is it our Silver Cloud

The reality is that general printing is declining as more and more previously printed magazines, books, advertising etc are now read in a digital format. But the good news is with the digital revolution more and more of the heavy industry is changing. As markets change it creates huge opportunities for those that are savvy and wish to look for the new markets. As we have mentioned on previous technical bulletins a lot of printing system which use to be analogue is changing to digital. New markets such as printing on different substrates, printing on consumer product etc are starting to boom. Every day we hear more and more new unique printing solutions coming to market.

One of the biggest markets is the barcoding and labelling industry. Sensient has a wide range of barcoding and coding inks available for these markets. We have access to these inks, if you have any enquires please contact us.

Smart Phones and Tablets

Recently I have seen an advertisement on television promoting the new iphone 5. The camera has the capability of capturing panoramic photos as you pan around the room. The advertisement then showed the panoramic print framed. This got me wondering, smart phone / tablet sales are really exploding and will this be a driving force for home printing again. It's obvious that printer manufacturers are making it easier to print direct from your smart phone / tablet to their latest printers.

Printing your emails direct from your phone, tablet, laptop computer to your printer with (Eprint) is another recent innovation that makes printing easy. You need an Eprint enabled printer which is a printer connected to the internet with a special dedicated email address. Send an email to the printers email address and it prints out automatically. You could be anywhere in the world and the pages would just print.

Every smart phone or tablet released has a in-built camera. The world has never had so many camera's in people's hands. But will the new advancements in technnology rejuvenate the home photo printing market? It's a question for those smarter than myself, but with anything if it's easy it's more likely people will use it.

OEMs Protecting Their Products

One of the OEM's at the conference gave a presentation on their approach to protecting their brand by removing counterfeit cartridges and patent-infringing products from the market place. They are also constantly investigating the misuse of their trademarks. It was a very interesting presentation in the sense that it's very important to see things from an OEM perspective.

They are well and truly active in purchasing cartridges from around the world to inspect for patent-infringing or counterfeit use. A common way they do this is to order products from a number of sources including online stores. With more and more industry news related to patent-infringing products and trademark issues it's important to be aware!


How to Become a Famous Chef Overnight

During our stay in Zhuhai we discovered a a nice western style restaurant area along the river. We heard rave reviews about an authentic Italian restaurant in the same area. Accompanied by another Australian we headed out to dinner for some authentic Italian pizza in 'China'.
After the dinner the owner of the business approached Dermot and asked him if he was this world famous Chef. Apparently they had seen him the day before and had been curious ever since. A double life or a coincidence I will let you decide!