Xerox has announced a raft of new technologies at Graph Expo this week, some of which are directly applicable to the office environment and some that may have implications for the future.
Issue #0631/1 - Although Production Printing is not in the direct remit for TCPglobal, Xerox has announced a new twin-engine technology that may have relevance to the office environment in the future – and certainly gives a clear indication of Xerox’s commitment to printer hardware and printing systems development.
Duplex printing takes on a whole new guise as Xerox puts two engines inside its latest production printer, due to be available to customers in the second quarter of 2007.
Xerox’s Nuvera 144 Digital Production System, the printer that benefits from this treatment, is designed for the printing of books, brochures, fliers, etc., at offset lithography printing quality.
Originally capable of running at 144ppm, single sided, the new Nuvera printer will be capable of 144ppm, duplex, by printing both sides of the paper simultaneously using the two engines together! This equals a speed of 288 sides per minute and will allow commercial printing companies to fulfil print contracts much faster and to much tighter deadlines.
Furthermore, commercial printers will benefit from the system’s ability (known as Pass Through Programming) to keep working even when one of the engines needs servicing. The print job literally ‘passes through’ the inactive engine. Thus, productivity will be maximised and profitability enhanced. Indeed, in the event that one engine is not available, the live engine is still capable of printing in duplex – but at 144ppm not 288ppm.
In order to attempt an explanation of what a duplex engine means, and how it could potentially work, we have prepared a couple of diagrams. These illustrative diagrams are highly schematised and simplified and are intended just to illustrate the principle of a dual-engined printer.
There are two ways in which the basic configuration could work: either with an ‘upside-down’ engine printing the bottom side of the paper;
or by arranging for the paper path to bring the paper up and over the first engine so that the second engine can be a complete duplicate of the first – much cheaper to produce.
Because of the size and speed of the particular engines involved in the Xerox Nuvera printer, neither of these diagrams relate directly to the Xerox configuration. The third diagram is sourced from Xerox and illustrates the, much more, complex configuration of the engines in the printer.
Additional complexity arises from the many obstacles to overcome when building a printer of this nature, problems for which Xerox has found innovative solutions.
Firstly, it is not enough just to ensure that the correct page is printed on the reverse sides of the paper but the registration of the images is also important. The paper has to move through the whole system at a uniform speed, with each engine writing the image and physically printing at a consistent speed with the other engine.
If there is no engine coordination, the image being prepared on the imaging drum of the second engine could be so far out of synchronisation with the paper that the first half of a page could print on one sheet of paper while the second half prints on a different sheet – thus ending up with that two halves of two different pages on one sheet.
Xerox has many years of experience with high-speed paper paths, so the physical movement of the paper is not a problem but, what of engine coordination? To tackle this issue, Xerox has developed what it describes as a smart ‘self-aware’ technology that reads the performance of each engine 1,000 times per second (more than 400 times per page!), keeping the two in perfect synchronisation.
Secondly, maintaining the print density and print quality of two separate engines is essential to ensure that the image on the two sides of the paper are compatible with one another. This is achieved using a sensor that determines the density of the printed image as much as twice a second – in other words, it is capable of measuring print density for, at least, every alternate piece of paper that passes through the printer, thus ensuring not only every page matches from back to front but also from the beginning of the print run to the end.
Xerox says that the new parallel engine technology development ‘will pave the way for future printer designs at Xerox’. To what extent some of the technologies could roll down into the office environment is unclear. However, it is unlikely, but not at all impossible (considering the development of single-pass colour engines), that a duplex engine would be a viable proposition for the office in the future. Sensor technologies, on the other hand, have been used in office and desktop printers for a long time – paper type sensing, colour consistency, etc. So, it is highly likely that new technologies developed at the high end will also be useful or have spin-off applications in office printers.
From the business point of view, this development is particularly relevant at a time when digital printing and, in particular, printing of personalised marketing materials is proving to be one of the major growth areas in the printing industry.
So, sorry to say, all that junk mail that you receive through your doors on a daily basis will now be easier, faster and cheaper to produce! Shame recycling processes are not moving ahead at the pace of the technology industry.
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