Brother goes back to the future with inkjet innovations

Innovations in inkjet, rather than laser printing, hold the key to developing a new generation of highly energy efficient printers, according to printer manufacturer Brother.

Speaking to IT Week's BusinessGreen blog, Mike Dinsdale head of communications and CSR at Brother UK and a former engineer at the company, said that it was impossible to deliver significant improvements in the energy efficiency of laser printers and as a result, environmentally-conscious firms were likely to turn to next generation inkjet printers as a means of reducing the energy consumption of their printers.

"We might be able to cut laser printers' energy use by 10 percent or so, but laser is by definition an energy hungry technology," he said. "If you are going to deliver real energy efficiency it has to come from inkjet, and the trick is to make the print head long enough so that it doesn’t have to move and you don't need a motor."

Dinsdale said Brother was currently developing a long head inkjet printer for printing photographs, which would be available by 2009 and promises to print 170 pages a minute boasting 600dpi and using just 13.5w/h of energy. In contrast, he said a current inkjet printer would use 40w/h and a laser printer up to 600w/h. He added that the company was also working on a similar long head printer for office use that would consume just 60w/h when in use.

Dinsdale predicted that growing concerns over the energy consumption of IT kit, particularly among public sector accounts, would convince many companies to adopt the new generation of inkjet printers.

"At the moment laser has an advantage in terms of speed, but long head will change tha," he argued. "We're convinced inkjet has a big future, though we accept it will need a real shift in industry and customer attitudes. It is concern over energy consumption that will stimulate that change in attitude."

The new energy efficiency inkjet printers are just part of a wider environmental strategy, according to Dinsdale, which has seen the company invest heavily in non-printer technologies, such as reusable paper and electronic paper display units that could help promote the paperless office.

"We have to accept that paper will become more precious and we may have to move on," he said. "We are throwing a huge amount of money into research and the vast majority of it isn’t going into conventional technologies, but into new systems."