Matt Heerema

ColorQube by Xerox is brilliant

So I’m a few months late on this (it was announced in May) but this is brilliant.

ColorQube by Xerox

ColorQube by Xerox is a technology that uses solid blocks of ink to laser print in color without cartridges. This means substantially less waste and (allegedly) substantially less cost. (I haven’t seen a cost comparison yet.)

This is wonderful innovation on Xerox’s part. I really hope they introduce this technology on consumer-oriented products soon! (It seems primarily geared at office and other industry-grade applications).

Way to go Xerox on vastly reducing waste. This is so intelligent I’m wondering why no one thought of it sooner!

Posted

in

by

Matt Heerema

Tags:

, , , ,

Comments

4 responses to “ColorQube by Xerox is brilliant”

  1. Tony Avatar
    Tony

    It was thought of sooner. I used a Tektronix Phaser at ISU in 1996 that used solid ink. It seems that Xerox bought the Phaser line and tech from Tektronix. Wikipedia says that solid ink printers have been around since 1986. It seems that the only new part of this is the green emphasis to sell more printers.

    Reply
  2. mheerema Avatar
    mheerema

    Well, you see how much journalistic research I've done. Now, to find out why the idea never caught on.

    Reply
  3. Tony Avatar
    Tony

    Imagine the mixing the capital cost of a color laser, the consumption rate of an inkjet, the durability of a crayon drawing and a warmup period long enough to brew a cup of tea. They saw limited use only in environments where there was enough print volume that the printer never needed to cool down and the color reproduction of competing technologies was just not good enough, as I recall.

    Reply
  4. PCC Avatar
    PCC

    Tony… you're right about the previous incarnations of solid ink. However, ColorQube is a different beast. First, it's a multifunction device designed for office printing… not a color laser. As a result, most of these types of devices are leased. As for consumption of supplies, one ink block produces about 10,000 pages… very efficient. The durability is equivalent to laser… a couple of third-party independent tests out there confirm this. Warmup time is drastically reduced due to a feature called Intelligent Ready which predicts printing patterns in your particular office.

    I'm no fan of Xerox… and I'm a skeptic. But, I demoed one of these devices a couple of weeks ago… and it rocked! The colors were brilliant and the solids on the page were truly solid… no blotching at all… and this was on crappy recycled paper. When I printed a pdf ripped from InDesign with numerous color images, the first page came out in about 20 seconds… and it was a large file.

    This technology has come a long long way in the past decade. I was shocked.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *