Xerox Melting wax technology rolls into Consumer desktops
When Xerox bought Tektronix some years back they continued to develop and produce office printers utilising the Tektronix technology of Melting Wax sticks. Indeed we have got a Xerox 8400 colour inkjet printer in our office, and it provides sterling service with high quality output. The only drawback that we can see is because the printer sprays a wax output right across the page it means that you can’t write on it afterwards, the wax actually clogs the roller ball in a standard Roller Ball pen.
Now however with new developments in the print head technology, the company is promising to roll out consumer desktop products within a year. I personally think this is a cracking idea if it is priced to enable consumers to buy both the printer and the inks. Solid ink is different to the usual inkjet cartridges that you are used to which normally incorporate liquid ink in a tank, sometimes up to 5 different colours in one tank. Solid ink comes as a moulded wax cube, each individual colour is moulded individually and you drop them into the appropriate slots in the printer (don’t ask - yes I have put them into the wrong ones!). The print head then melts the wax at between 70 -100 deg’s C and the melted ink is then sprayed onto a Drum unit for transfer onto paper - sounds simple and produces a very nice gloss finish onto ordinary 80gsm copier paper.
The other big advantage to this technology over the Inkjet/Laser technology is that it is much more environmentally friendly. The outer packaging is much smaller, there is no cartridge as the ink is moulded into its container and finally there is no empty cartridge to dispose of when the ink runs out.
Now though with the development of new heads the technology should be available to the consumer end of the market place soon, watch this space for details
