Memjet made an interesting announcement at PACK EXPO in Chicago this week. It brings very cost-effective, high quality inkjet printing that can be used by brand owners and manufacturers to move their label, tag, ticket, card and folding-carton printing out of a centralized print facility and directly onto their factory or warehouse floors.

Memjet has been relatively low key; you may not have heard of them.  They don’t manufacture printers, but rather, manufacture the imaging components that OEMs can place in printers.  You could think of them as sort of the inkjet Intel Inside. As such, Powered by Memjet printers are coming onto the market and there were some interesting demonstrations at PACK EXPO.

The company was founded in 2002 and already has more than 3,000 patents globally, as well as 2,000 more pending. Memjet manufactures the printheads and print controllers and has the waterbased pigment inks manufactured to its specifications.  President Sean Marske indicates there are other ink formulations in the works. The ultra-wide printhead contains 70,400 nozzles designed to fire up to 774 million drops per second at true 1600x1600 dpi resolution.  Five color channels can be configured to user specifications, but are generally CMYKK.  The print engine controller has more than 100 million transistors and supports printing at 12 inches per second while also managing communication between the subcomponents of the printhead, maintenance station and ink deliver system.  The large ink tank holds up to 250 ml of ink per color.