San Diego, CA -- According to a story which appeared on the Xconomy San Diego website, it appears that Memjet is poised to make some printer noise later this year. They seemingly float in and out of the news every so often and always seem on the verge of something major. Here at Castle Ink, we interviewed their VP of Marketing, Kim Beswick, back in March of this year about Memjet and some of their future plans. Most recently, they had announced the release of a label printer with their print engine inside, but branded by the company Own-X.
Memjet’s “schtick”, if you will, going forward is not to actually manufacture the printers themselves, but to just sell the “print heads, ink, and other components” to those companies with whom it partners. Those companies will retain the rights to brand the printer. CEO Len Lauer puts it this way, “ ‘We’re not coming out with a Memjet-branded printer, we want to do in-branding.” For Lauer, he would very much like to see Memjet competing for the right to be the technology behind those companies that make labels for “everything from Heinz ketchup bottles to UPS shipping labels.”
In addition to finding a niche amongst label printers, Memjet also hopes to find some room amongst the competitors in photo printing kiosks “inside pharmacies and warehouse retailers…large wide format printing, CAD, and blueprints.” Lauer feels confident that there is still plenty of money to be made because of the lack of spending by companies on research and development.
Already Memjet has made some headway in the mass mailing industry. Their printers are reportedly capable of printing out 10,000 envelopes per hour in full color. Not only is it faster than the competition, the cost of consumables is lower as well. Lauer refers to their technology as “‘disruptive’”. One of Memjet’s keys to success thus far has been their patents. The Xconomy articles reports that Memjet currently holds roughly 3,000 U.S. patents with an additional 2,000 which are still pending.
So now you might wondering why Memjet is so different. It all starts with their print head. The typical inkjet features a print head that will move laterally across the page laying ink down as it moves back and forth. Memjet, who sought to build the better mousetrap, has a print head which measures 8.66 inches in width and extends across the entire page. It also remains in a fixed position and comes with a gargantuan number of nozzles—70,000 to be exact—which is much, much more than the 2,000 or so you find on a standard inkjet. It also gives Memjet the ability to print at 1,600 x 1,600 dpi, which is another astounding level of achievement.
Another important feature of Memjet print heads is the size of the nozzles. “Each Memjet nozzle is less than 100 microns wide (roughly the width of human hair) and uses micro-electro-mechanical technology (the MEM in Memjet) to spew 1.2-picoliter droplets of ink at a rate of 900 million per second,” according to Lauer. Interestingly enough, most of the external funding they have received to produce this awesome technology has come from a solitary investor whose name Lauer declined to reveal. However, he did say that, “‘It’s an individual with a lot of money, someone whose name I’m sure you’d recognize, who came in as a private equity investor.’” Customization is the final key to Memjet label printing technology and other printing applications. Lauer offers the suggestion that Heinz perhaps could have a custom label for a local sports team; in Lauer’s case it would be Padres and the Chargers.
The future certainly looks bright for this company, and Castle Ink will do its best to stay on top of Memjet’s latest and greatest developments. The article indicated that we’d likely see something later in 2010.
