Japanese printer manufacturer Brother has unveiled the prototype of a laser that can print at 100 pages per minute (ppm).
Brother Europe's Chris Marshall introduced TechRadar to the printer at Brother's European Press Event in Berlin. "The printer does [100ppm] by having over 5,000 nozzles that fire across the paper in one go. What's more, power consumption is also significantly lower than any other high end laser printer."
The 100ppm cited speed is 58 per cent faster than current speedy mono lasers on the market, which hover around the 60ppm mark. The printer incorporates a new linehead technology in order to make the magic happen.
Still full quality
Despite the speed, Brother claim that the prints will be full laser quality. "It's taken a lot of new technology to print at this speed at laser quality," continued Marshall. "We expect it to be available in Europe over the next year or maybe two."
The prototype uses a new print head technology with a 21.5cm page-wide linehead and there are 5,198 nozzles that allow printing across the entire page at the same time.
According to Brother there's a number of advanced mechanical technologies in place to enable the machine to feed paper quick enough to print at 100ppm combined with dual-sided printing. Indeed, when quizzed about whether the 100ppm was actually reflective of performance, Marshall confirmed that was its true throughput.
Name, appearance and detailed specification of the printer will most likely change before the launch. However, as the printer will be a corporate-class device, expect it to cost a pretty penny.
