Memjet mounts market push from high-tech Sydney R&D hub
10 Oct 2012 | Steven Kiernan | Comment now
Memjet hopes the appearance of its logo on devices from machinery manufacturers will elicit the kind of brand value 'Intel Inside' offers PC makers.
The printhead company has grand ambitions for its technology to span the digital printing landscape.
The 'Powered by Memjet' badge already appears on a wide range of machines, including wide-format printers, label machines from local Sydney manufacturer Rapid Machinery and a rising number of desktop printers.
Jeff Bean, Memjet's vice-president of brand & communications, said he wants to Memjet brand to be seen as a "third way for printing" in the office space.
"First there was inkjet. Then laser was invented. Finally there is Memjet, an entirely new category of super-fast, affordable colour that neither traditional inkjet nor laser can deliver," he told ProPrint.
Speed and quality are Memjet's calling cards. Each printhead contains 70,400 jets, shooting millions of drops per second.
The technology is also making headway in the production digital space, where Memjet-powered machines are expected to compete against market-leading digital presses such as the Xerox iGen4 and HP Indigo.
"We have partners today that are aimed squarely at those markets and those competing machines. The OEMs include Colordyne and SuperWeb. Both have 'production digital' solutions that deliver lower hardware costs and attractive running costs," said Bean.
There is no word on whether these production machines will be sold in Australia.
Bean also told ProPrint that Memjet had no plans to go directly to market and would remain solely focused on OEM arrangements.
Memjet has strong OEM credentials from chief executive Len Lauer, who joined the company in 2010 from Qualcomm, a tech firm that is relatively unknown to the wider public but turns over $15 billion a year and is the world's largest supplier of chipsets to smartphones.
Memjet remains the sole supplier of inks for its devices, which it manufactures in the US and which create the kind of lucrative revenue stream that HP Indigo has for its ElectroInk and that Benny Landa will have once his NanoInk machines hit the market next year.
Next year could mark a major milestone for Memjet when wide-format machines manufactured by tier-one vendors Canon-Océ and Fuji Xerox come to market.
The prototype Project Velocity machine displayed at the Canon-Océ stand at Drupa 2012 churned out 500 A0-format sheets per hour.
The 'waterfall' printhead technology at the heart of Memjet was originally devised under a veil of secrecy by Australian outfit Silverbrook Research at facilities in North Ryde and Balmain. The technology was taken to market by Memjet under licence.
But this veil is being lifted. ProPrint was given a tour of the facility last month, a sign of the company's new mandate for openness after a legal stoush between Silverbrook and Memjet led to the US company acquiring the Australian operations and the vast majority of its workers.
Memjet employs 300 staff across its Australian operations, 50 of whom hold PhDs. The North Ryde and Waterloo facility boast 'Class 10,000' clean rooms, meaning there are fewer than 10,000 particles of 0.5 micrometres per square foot of air.
http://www.proprint.com.au/New...h-sydney-rd-hub.aspx
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