Lenovo Launches Memjet-Based (small-format) Printer in China

May 10, 2011 05:28pm EST (Article by Tony Hoffman) (Article found on pcmag.com)

Lenovo has announced the RJ600N, a Memjet-based office printer intended for sale in China. Memjet is a high-speed color printing technology being marketed by a company of the same name. The RJ600N has a wicked-fast claimed color printing speed: up to 60 pages per minute, and a low claimed cost per printed page. Lenovo is the first company in the world to release a Memjet printer to the office market.

The RJ600N is the first fruit of a partnership between Memjet and Lenovo that was made public at CES in January. Lenovo, China's largest PC manufacturer, also holds approximately an 18 percent share of the Chinese laser printer market. The RJ600n is Lenovo China's first digital color printer. Its claimed cost per page was quoted to be 0.1-0.15 Yuan ($0.02) for monochrome printing and 0.3-0.5 Yuan ($0.06) per sheet for color. The claimed color cost per page is particularly low.

Memjet-based printers owe their speed to their extra-wide print heads, 8.77 inches (222.8 mm) across, which span the width of a page. Each print head contains more than 70,000 ink nozzles, 17 times that of traditional print heads. This design allows Memjet-powered printers to deliver more than 700 million drops of ink per second onto a page.

Lenovo isn't the only partner that Memjet has taken on. At CES, the company also announced alliances with KPowerscience to bring fanfold (continuous paper with holes on the edges) printers based on its technology to Taiwan, Korea, and China, and WeP Peripherals to bring 60-ppm color printers to India. More recently, Memjet announced partnerships with Medion AG and Lomond to bring printers based on its technology to Germany and Russia, respectively.

Joel’s comments:

Okay, so after several years of hearing about Memjet technology, a “Memjet-technology-based” small-format printer is now on the market, ….. albeit in China!

Unfortunately, the announcement of Lenovo’s launch of this printer did not mention the “purchase price” of this printer. If someone is able to find that information, please let me know, so I can “update” this post to include that information.

This printer is probably priced at less than $1,000.00 USD, and, in saying that, I’m basing that guestimate on remarks MemJet made, quite some time ago, that a small-format printer, using MemJet technology, would likely sell for around $600.00 USD. Anyway, at some point we’ll find out the price that Lenovo is selling this printer for.

Nowadays, manufacturers (such as K/M, Canon and Ricoh) and dealers who offer high-speed color-capable small-format printers are reportedly charging around $.05 per color-click for “service and toner”. But, one would have to spend $30,000 or more for such a system.

Inasmuch as I have yet to see a “color print” off of a Lenovo printer, I have no idea how the quality of a color print from a Lenovo MemJet printer compares to the quality of color prints produced by K/M, Canon or Ricoh high-speed, small-format color printers. However, if the quality of color prints produced by the Lenovo printer are comparable, then the Lenovo printer, once it is out there in numbers, will likely erode (seriously erode) sales of the more expensive toner-based (and even some high-speed ink-jet based) color printers.

I still haven’t found any news about a “large-format” MemJet printer coming to market.