I’m a techno-lumberjack and I’m OK…
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Data Protection, Blog, Printers on
Guilty as charged. I print hardcopy of important documents so they do not get lost, so that I can keep them safe, so that I can easily share them with anyone who might need to see them. And it appears that I am not alone in participating in this retro-archiving activity, despite my high tech background, as a new report from the EMC Corporation suggests British business is printing so much stuff that it is costing around £11 billion per year.
In the poll of 500 office workers across the UK, KRC Research discovered that people spend 52 minutes every day searching for ‘lost’ emails and assorted electronic documents with those in the South East being most likely to waste more time hunting down the elusive information that is hidden somewhere within the network.
Move towards my neck of the woods, the North of England, and office workers seem concerned with reducing the amount of paper used during the working day. Yet workers aged 18-34 are printing out an incredible 100 pages worth of paper documentation each and every day on average. Makes my 10-20 sheets of A4 look positively green by comparison.
Talking of which, the same survey also revealed that 81% of office workers want their employers to do more for the environment, and the same number have a personal desire to reduce their carbon footprint in the office.
Nice to know that I am not alone in being totally screwed up when it comes to balancing environmental concerns with the day to day reality of office survival. Makes me feel a little better to realize that I am not the only person who understands IT systems, and knows how to archive documents securely, but who still resorts to good old fashioned comfort food of information technology: printouts…
Rated: 73.33% (3 votes)
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Nanotechnology machine gun printer showcased
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Printers on
High-speed nanotechnology printing that promises to revolutionise the print industry in the same way that the Vickers machine gun did for rifle weaponry was showcased at the Gorillas of Tomorrow technology innovation event in Cambridge today. Promising to combine the productivity benefit of a digital process with the throughput and quality of offset printing, Inkski founder Dr Daniel Hall described the Light Initiated Liquid Offset (LILO) process which uses a spinning cylinder to quick fire drops of ink as making “personalised newspaper feasible…additionally it would drastically reduce the cost of printing small niche publications, enabling high quality journals to be produced.”
While conventional ink jet printing has the advantage of being cheap and able to work with many different inks, it is also slow. Just a tenth the speed of traditional offset printing in fact.
The ink needs to flow back into the chambers behind each nozzle before firing, a reloading process that obviously takes a finite amount of time. By developing a new print head, Inkski has sidestepped this problem.
“Instead of refilling the chamber, drops of ink are created continuously in an array on the outer surface of a rapidly spinning cylinder. Individual drops are activated by a laser and selectively fired from the surface of the ‘jetting cylinder’ onto paper, to form the image,” says Dr Hall says.
Inkski have shown that this approach is capable of firing drops at a rate of 400,000 drops per second from each channel. That’s about 20 times the speed of an average inkjet printhead. Put into perspective this provides digital print speeds of up to 10m/sec at resolutions comparable to offset printing. LILO could make short-runs economical, reduce the cost of collating publications as pages are printed in sequence, and improve work-flow by enabling printers to swap between jobs without the time-consuming set-up times for plates. Using standard inks and with the cost-profile of digital printing, LILO allows the production cost per leaflet to stay the same no matter the quantity being printed.
“The advantages to the printing industry are great,” says Daniel Hall. “A magazine of 100 pages could be printed with all the pages in order, ready for binding, rather than at present when page 1 is printed, plates changed, then page 2, and so on. The whole process of folding, cutting and ordering pages would be removed.”
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HP has print head in the clouds
By Davey Winder in Editorial
It will probably have passed most people by, not least because HP isn’t exactly making a song and dance about the release, but its CloudPrint Beta could be a really rather important milestone for mobile workers.
The concept is deceptively simple, allowing users to share, store and print documents using their mobile telephones. So you can print documents from the desktop to the CloudPrint virtual printer and it then effectively lives in the cloud. The service then notifies all the people you want it sent to via SMS with a document code, and together with the telephone number that is all that is required to retrieve the document from anywhere. The ability to send SMS web URLs to CloudPrint from your mobile device is in the pipeline, which will let the service render the document along with that SMS code, to save reading web pages on inappropriately small screens. Also coming soon is the ability to let CloudPrint print documents directly to your office printer so that they will be there waiting for you when you get back in from your travels.
All it takes to get started is a download of the CloudPrint printer driver, and it seems to work really well. This despite the word that I have heard suggesting that from concept to developing the working Beta took just 8 weeks.
Certainly it is worth a look, not least because it moves business functionality out from behind the firewall and into the access from anywhere Internet cloud.
Nice one HP!
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Use an inkjet printer or die
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Printers on
That is the rather surprising apparent conclusion of research carried out by the Queensland University of Technology, which suggests that laser printing is just as bad for your health as smoking. The tests on more than sixty different laser printers revealed that a third were emitting potentially dangerous levels of toner micro-particles. Particles small enough to penetrate the lungs just by being alive in the same room, in the same way as standing in a room with a tobacco smoker leads to passive inhalation.
The story does sound a little far fetched, and the Australian researchers calling for governments to place health warnings on printers does little to add to the credibility. What next, having to go outside to do your printing?
Still, the fact remains that micro-particles of toner-like material emitted by these devices could lead to respiratory irritation or perhaps even more chronic illnesses such as have been associated with the use of Asbestos for example.
The testing apparently took place in an open plan office space, with air-bound particle levels being measured throughout the day and night. Office hours proved the most dangerous, with levels unsurprisingly increasing the most when new toner cartridges were used but also when graphics intensive printing was done which demands a greater quantity of toner.
There is, however, no research material available to link levels of laser toner micro-particles in the air with illness, let alone death. Who do you think would die first, a non-smoker with a laser printer or someone on twenty a day using an inkjet?
My guess is that a new round of research funding is coming up at the Uni…
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