Las Vegas - Memjet today announced that Lenovo will introduce the world’s fastest color office printing technology in China under a partnership with Memjet. The Memjet technology is twice the speed of the nearest competing color printer in its class and represents the most significant printing industry advancement in 25 years.

“Printing is an important strategic area of growth for Lenovo, and the partnership with Memjet will provide us superior color printing technologies to serve our customers and more aggressively compete for new business,” said Chen Xudong, vice president and GM of Lenovo China Region. “With our focus on innovative products that deliver complete printer hardware and supplies solutions to Chinese consumers and our incorporation of Memjet color printing technologies, we believe Lenovo can become the number-one provider of office printer solutions in China within the next few years.”

Lenovo, which is best known for its ThinkPad, the popular notebook PC, has been the largest PC maker in China since 1997, and also has quickly established a 18.3 percent market share for the China laser printer market*.

“Lenovo’s strong product portfolio, established record of success and incredible global brand, combined with our revolutionary color printing technologies, can completely transform the office printing market in China,” said Len Lauer, president and CEO for Memjet.

Memjet’s High-Speed, Color Printing Technology

Protected by more than 3,000 global patents, Memjet represents an entirely new category of technology that makes possible high-quality color printing at never-before seen speeds. Besides lightning-speeds and high-quality output, Memjet-powered printers, on average, are half the total cost of ownership versus other color office printers.

Until now, printing technology has been limited to laser and traditional inkjet systems. Memjet technologies are poised in 2011 to disrupt both in the office market. Current competing office laser printers can provide 60 pages per minute but not in color, and competing inkjet office printers can provide color but only at 30 pages per minute

Memjet-powered office printers can provide both color and speed: 1600x800 dpi resolution at 60 pages per minute.

Memjet is able to do this by putting more than 70,000 ink nozzles on a single printhead—17 times that of traditional printheads. Memjet’s printhead is 8.77 inches (222.8mm) and spans the width of a page. This design allows Memjet-powered printers to deliver more than 700 million drops of ink per second on a page.

In combination with other partner announcements by Memjet at CES, Lenovo’s adoption of Memjet technology signals the beginning of the first market shift in decades for the office printer market. Memjet technologies are poised to change existing models of how color printers and ink are developed, marketed and sold to customers.

As an “ingredient brand,” Memjet supplies manufacturing partners across the printing industry the same way leading-edge chip makers supply manufacturing partners across the cellphone, smartphone and personal computing industries. Memjet technology has already been incorporated into commercially available labels, packaging and addressing products that were announced recently at Pack Expo in Chicago.  

Memjet this year will be announcing major manufacturing partners in photo retail and wide format markets, as well as others for its initial markets of labels and packaging, and home and office.