Drupa snooper – Memjet comes out of the shadows

Super fast inkjet from Australian inventor is set to change the course of printing history at this drupa. Andy McCourt tracks the rise and rise of Kia Silverbrook’s amazing MEMS.

Silverbrook, formerly managing director of Canon’s CISRA research facility, first set up his R&D laboratory into MEMS (micro electro-mechanical systems) in Balmain in 1995. Since then he has amassed a fortress of over 3,000 patents with 2,000 more pending – making him the world’s most prolific patenter. Always keen to stay out of the spotlight, Silverbrook, with his partner, Janette Lee, rarely publicizes anything except the patents, despite there being up to 500 scientists and engineers engaged in on-going research and development at their secretive North Ryde plant. There is no name on the building, just a ‘Private Property’ sign and security barrier.

The company has a business partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to manufacturer the MEMS hardware and controllers. The commercial arms are the ‘Memjet companies’ based in San Diego and divided into Labels, Wide Format, Home & Office and Photo. The board and management are replete with experienced hands in IT and printing. Len Lauer is President and CEO, 30-year veteran of IT with firms such as Bell Atlantic, Qualcomm and IBM. CFO Mark Legg had a lengthy career with American Reprographics. Bill McGlynn had 24 years with HP, taking its printer division from $150 million to $24 billion in annual sales. Other managers have experience with Kodak and HP. The company has offices and in some cases R&D operations in Dublin, Taipei, Singapore and Sydney.

Big money backer
The money behind Memjet comes from one of America’s richest people, George Kaiser, through his investment arm, Argonaut Private Equity of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Kaiser made his wealth in oil and also owns, and is chairman of the Bank of Oklahoma plus a string of smaller regional banks. All of these are so well managed, they sailed through the GFC, reportedly declining the US government’s TARP bailout money, made available following the sub-prime meltdown.

As a privately-held company, Memjet is reluctant to comment on financial specifics such as plans, if any, for an IPO or even the number of Memjet-powered print engines already in the marketplace. The company is, however, very bullish on growth plans in this drupa year of 2012.
Memjet itself does not manufacture printing devices but licenses the technology to OEM partners including, but not limited to: LG, Lenovo, Lomond, Astro Machine Corp, Colordyne, Xanté, Image Systems Group, OWN-X and Australia’s own Rapid Label Systems of Chatswood, NSW whose X-1 and X-2 Memjet digital label presses have proved very successful.

500 ppm and climbing
Last week Memjet took a giant leap into the high-volume commercial colour inkjet world when its OEM partner Delphax announced a 500-page per minute sheetfed machine to be launched at drupa. Memjet VP of Branding & Communications, Jeff Bean, (pictured) told drupa Snooper:
“Our booth will showcase our technology that is commercialized in different printing applications and markets focusing on our labels and wide-format commercial offerings. One of our OEM partners, Delphax, just announced that it will be introducing its new Elan series digital color print systems powered by Memjet technologies at drupa in the Delphax exhibit in Hall 8b, stand C10. We are working on other exciting opportunities which you will hear more about prior to and during the event.”

The Delphax OEM is a significant step because up until now, Memjet for sheetfed printing has focused on 60ppm office-grade printers; a significant market in its own right but not a game changer where drupa is concerned. 500 ppm – at 1600dpi – is a game changer in a market where 100ppm is common, make no mistake. Delphax has been in the high-volume transactional printer market for 30 years and also has 2,200ppm mono web-feed machines in the market, using electron beam Imaging, not Inkjet. It would not be drawing too long a bow to say we might expect a web-feed Memjet powered press from Delphax in the future.

Memjet’s Jeff Bean is prepared to say this much: “We’re working on some exciting new commercial and industrial opportunities that we look forward to sharing with you in the near future. At drupa, we are planning to showcase superfast, cost-effective color printing solutions that people have never seen before.”

He adds: “We embrace high speeds and innovation. And we provide OEMs the ability to integrate our technology in new and exciting ways. Solutions based on our technology can go as far as our OEMs can take them. Whether they want to incorporate with existing technologies or build new ones is up to them. Our focus is on core color printing technology and components, which gives OEMs, manufacturers—and even brands--the ability to enter the commercial print industry value chain and the freedom to print exactly what they want, when they want it, where they want it and how they want it.”

Memjet’s drupa moment
Inside drupa’s Hall 5, Memjet will be directly facing Kodak, alongside EFI and in the same Hall as Epson and Impika. No prizes for guessing the strategy behind this. They call it disruptive technology and that’s disruptive. There are also the OEM booths in other Halls mentioned above. But in light of the fact that Memjet does not make printers – their OEM partners do, why is the firm exhibiting at drupa?

“Our objective at drupa is to show the industry where digital printing is headed, which is fast affordable color, lower cost of ownership, reduced hardware cost, print on-demand, and environmentally friendly--an entirely new category of color digital printing. We’ll show how Memjet is liberating customers across the printing spectrum through continuous evolution, partnerships and technologies that power printers far beyond what traditional markets have come to know and expect,” says Memjet’s Bean.

On the all-important topic of inks, Memjet is coy. Memjet printheads – 8.77 inches long each and firing 70,400 nozzles of down to 1.2 picolitre droplets (700 million per second!) – will naturally only run Memjet inks but the company remains tight-lipped about where they are made and what formulations are involved. That they are aqueous and presently CMYK is known. There are admitted plans to introduce more colours, white ink, UV-curable and high viscosity inks but indications are that these will employ a new generation of printheads.
The Rapid Machinery X-1 and 2 label presses use 250ml cartridges but bulk Memjet ink is also available in 2 and 10 litre containers. Interestingly, many of the research boffins at Silverbrook Research are organic chemists and rheology/thixotrophy specialists, such as its Head of Chemistry, Professor Damon Ridley, ex-Sydney and Oxford Universities.

UV and additional colour ink plans will be particularly relevant to the wide-format market where plain CMYK is getting scarcer. The existing Xanté and OWN-X WF 42” printers use five Memjet printheads in a staggered array and can produce at up to 19.5 M2 per minute, or 1,171 m2 per hour – blindingly fast by roll-fed inkjet standards where 140 M2 per hour is considered fast in ‘draft’ mode. Even the fastest HP Scitex Turbojets run at 500 m2 per hour, albeit with six-colour UV inks but at reduced resolution and 42pl droplets. Memjet goes twice as fast at 1600dpi x 800dpi and fires sub-2pl droplets (but currently with an aqueous CMYKK inkset).

Clearly, there are exciting opportunities ahead when Memjet’s wideformat OEM partners come up with wider arrays using additional inks.

Memjet printhead
As with all inkjet printing systems, choice of printhead is critical. Memjet’s OEM partners have just one available at the moment, the 8.77” 70,400 nozzle model which employs drop-on-demand thermal technology. It is designed as a consumable item but is said to cost only about $300 to replace. It operates as a static printhead with the substrate moving beneath it – there is no side-to-side motion.

Most current iterations of Memjet technology in the label and envelope printing sector use a single printhead, such as in the Rapid X-1 and LabelPrint System’s Speedstar 3000. These are bench-top devices for short-run and variable data printing. However, Colordyne Technologies of Scottsdale, Arizona released a 5-printhead label press with a spot colour added late in 2011. It features reel-to-reel web handling from AzTech Converting and can run at 48 metres per minute at 1600 x 1200dpi. This machine – the Colordyne CDT 1600PC could be described as the first ‘production class’ iteration of Memjet technology as it can handle job runs of up to 75,000 labels with ease. Cost is said to be around $150,000 – about half what you might expect to pay for a 5-colour Flexo press.

The future
Following many years of hard work and patient investing, Memjet is now ready to commercialise its technology to the world’s graphic arts community at drupa, through its growing band of OEM partners. No doubt many potential new OEMs will be making a bee-line for Hall 5 to open discussions and, for sure, new ones will be announced before and at the show.

Memjet is surely on a sweet ride from here on and Australian visitors to its booth can justifiably say that, although Memjet is very much an American globalised company – it all started right here in Australia and the R&D for Memjet’s future roadmap is still here.
Hall5/stand E28


Drupa is the world’s largest trade fair dedicated to the printing and allied graphic media industries. Held every 4 years, it opens on May 3rd at the Messe Düsseldorf, Germany and closes on May 16th. The Printing Industries Association of Australia, in conjunction with Eastern Suburbs Travel, is organizing tours including a pre-drupa ANZAC-themed tour of Gallipoli and beyond. For details please contact Marty, Vicki or Sonia on 02 9388 0666 or estcolovelly@optusnet.com.au