Ricoh's gel printing challenges inkjets and laser

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 23 October 2006 19:00

Your IT - Entertainment

A new printing technology has taken on colour inkjets and laser printers in Japan over the past 18 months, with over 200,000 units sold. Called a GelSprinter, it is available in the UK and has launched in Australia today, and is an interesting alternative with cool features all its own.

 

 

With incredible inkjet printers, the ready availability of colour laser printers and the dominance of multifunction devices that print, scan, copy and (on some models) fax, it’s easy to forget that the dot matrix printed once ruled supreme across the universe.

An amazing advance in the quest for personal home printing, noisy old dot matrix technology evolved to deliver a high resolution printout (from 9 pins to 24), and then to colour printing using four colour ribbons.

Laser printers had been around for a while, but were still the expensive holy grail of quality printing, while inkjet printers from Canon, Epson and HP were yet to appear in black and white models, let alone in colour.

Fast forward to 2005, and a new Gel printing technology was unveiled in Japan. Ricoh’s press release tells us that: “Unlike traditional dye and pigment-based inkjet printers, the GelSprinter uses a viscous liquid gel that gelatinises and dries almost instantly upon contact with paper. This minimises bleeding and smudging of images. The gel is also water and sunlight resistant, resulting in increased document durability”.

We’ve yet to see a printout on plain paper, and we will be asking for a review model to put it to the test, but the gel almost sounds like someone decided to take the ink and mix it with toner to produce a gel! That’s clearly not the way it was made, but it is interesting to think that a gel is one of the few practical alternatives to liquid ink, those dye-sub wax based technologies and powdery tones.

Ricoh says the GelSprinters can print documents at “a maximum of 3600 x 1200 dots per inch (dpi) equivalent”, so text and photos should look very sharp and clear. Each GelSprinter also features an electrostatic belt transfer system. This is designed to ensure that paper is always transported consistently and reliably.

That’s Ricoh’s claim, and simply using the printer for any length of time will quickly verify that, or not. We’ve all seen paper go a bit wonky in inkjet printers as it starts to print, sometimes righting itself, and sometimes not! That’s probably more so the case with older model s than the latest ones, but if Ricoh’s system is consistent, that will be an improvement.