You may have seen the Business Week article in which Antonio Perez said that when he peered into a microscope in the Rochester, NY, Research & Development lab in 2003, he realized that Kodak "had it all here ... The Holy Grail of Inkjet Printing." Part of what Antonio was looking at during that visit was Kodak's internally developed MEMS printhead technology.

The capabilities of our KODAK EASYSHARE printers depend in large part on the innovative design of the printhead. In this posting, we will describe the technology behind the printhead with its 3,840 firing chambers, each comprising a heater, expansion chamber and nozzle. The challenge for the Kodak design team was to come up with a printhead that could deliver the ink very precisely onto the paper (or other media), handling photos and text with the same excellent quality. To further complicate our task, the printhead needed to be very durable and last through many ink tank changes while maintaining superb image quality. This would make replacement ink cartridges far less expensive, since they would not have to include the costly printhead (it could stay on the printer). Early work in Kodak Research on Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) provided us with the foundations to design and build a unique thermal inkjet drop ejector. It provides very high quality photos and text, at good printing speeds.

Cross-Section of Inkjet Printhead

The printhead uses heat to control the formation and delivery of the ink droplet:

• When the heater is pulsed on, it heats the ink and causes a vapor bubble to expand. This pushes ink out of the nozzle, where surface tension pulls it into a droplet.
• After the heater is pulsed off, the bubble is vented to atmosphere and the chamber refills with ink.
• The chamber is now ready to be fired again.

Thermal profile of a firing chamber

In most thermal inkjet printers, the ink in the nozzle that is not ejected collapses back onto the heater with substantial force, wearing it out over time. In our design, the vapor bubble vents to the atmosphere, so there is essentially no mechanical wear on the heater. In addition, the material forming the heater does not change over time as much as most thin film heater materials. Because of this, the heater not only lasts though many ink tank changes, but in addition the characteristics of the drops are very stable over long lifetimes.

Most inkjet printheads have a separate nozzle plate attached to the integrated circuit silicon, forming a sandwich with fluid passages in between. These components need to be aligned with great precision, which is inherently difficult. Misalignment results in dot placement errors. By building nozzles directly into our printhead, we eliminated this problem and gained precision. Our nozzles are formed using only thin film semiconductor fabrication processes; a monolithic structure, which allows alignment tolerances that would be impossible for the traditional two-plate systems. We chose to make our nozzles out of glass, an inorganic material, because it can be shaped very precisely and uniformly. Since the layer is homogeneous, nothing wears down and print quality remains constant. Using this state of the art silicon fabrication technology, Kodak is able to place dots on paper with very high precision which, when combined with Kodak's nano-particle pigment ink and microporous media technologies, results in Kodak lab-quality photos.

Exploded view of printhead and ink tanks

Very fast printing speed

We chose a nozzle layout to provide high frequency firing, and warming pulses that would vary to maintain uniform drop size as the printhead heats up. In this way image quality remains consistent when printing in different room conditions or during long print jobs.

PRINTHEAD AND INK TANK ASSEMBLY

MEMS Fabrication Technology Thermal Inkjet Printhead. Our goals of unsurpassed photo quality, excellent quality black text, and very fast printing speed, as well as providing industry leading ease of use and cost per print, led us to a printhead architecture, featuring a 3840 nozzle printhead that is part of the printer, not part of the replaceable ink supply. We utilize a total of 6 inks, one for text black, four photo colors - cyan, magenta, yellow and photo black - and a clear protective ink. The text black is provided in a separate tank, and the 5 photo inks are provided in a single color tank. We also utilize two different nozzle sizes resulting in 2.7 pico-liter and 6.5 pico-liter drop sizes. Both tanks are mounted on the printhead at all times, so the KODAK EASYSHARE All-in-One Printer, with its two paper trays, can print photos, text or mixed graphics documents any time, without any swapping of tanks.

Working on this project was a great experience. An inkjet writing system is a complex integration of multiple technologies. Kodak has the unique situation of having expertise in all of these areas. This allowed us to integrate the subsystems and make tradeoffs between the technologies to optimize the product for the customer. This Rochester, NY-based team was hand selected and is comprised of experts in media development, pigment ink technology, ink jet physics, MEMS fabrication, image science, and printhead design. The team has incredible scientists and capabilities, allowing the technology to be developed in record time. It has been a personally rewarding experience to work with such a high-powered and cooperative team.

We hope that you enjoy using this technology as much as we enjoyed developing it!

Kodak recently sent me to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Of course, Kodak expense reports don't usually cover certain expenses.

"But Boss, I was doing Probability Research."

"What happens to your money in Vegas stays in Vegas." Oh well.

Whose idea was this show, anyway? It is so big that there is no way you can see everything. In fact, I think the main idea is to provide an opportunity for me to embarrass myself with my lack of knowledge about what was there.

"So, Randy, tell me about the fabulous Whatzit from Whosamajigger."

"Uh, uh, uh...I didn't actually get to the Whosamajigger booth."

"So remind me why we sent you there?"

"Probability Research?"

So as I walk the show, I realize I am getting a tan from all the photons leaping out of the huge flat-panel displays that seem to be in all the booths. Even so, I can't wait to be the first kid on my block to cover the window in my living room with my 120" HD screen. College education for the kids? Bah! I need to see American Idol with life-sized contestants. My surround sound will be the envy of all on my street, since they will be able to enjoy the subwoofer right through the walls of their houses. And I'll have all the content I could ever want pulsing through my media center, also known as a game box. When it's time to watch the big game, my remote will not only turn on my entertainment system, it will automatically close all the blinds, dim the lights, hold my calls, put the house in stealth mode and command my personal robot to bring me the beverage of my choice. System after system after system all hooked together, working in harmony and providing me with the high-technology-enabled worry-free existence I've always wanted. Just like Kodak's Founder, George Eastman, said back in 1888, "You press the button, we do the rest."

Or maybe not. Maybe I'll need that Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering I never got or that even bigger wallet I don't have to make all these things work together. And the real kicker? What if something goes wrong somewhere in all this interconnectedness? Is it a problem with the universal remote, or the media center, or the display, or is the robot not quite as trustworthy as its maker wants you to think?

Probability Research tells me that we still have some work to do.

Wow, what a morning! As Susan mentioned in her blog The Inkjet Story, today we launched one of the most exciting products in Kodak history - our lineup of KODAK EASYSHARE All-in-One Printers. Broadcasting from NBC Studios in New York City, this event was hosted by Nathan and Max - stars of Kodak's marketing campaign Ink Is It! This special edition of Ink Is It! featured Antonio Perez, Kodak CEO; Molly Shannon, former Saturday Night Live cast member; and David Morrish, Senior Vice President at Best Buy with music provided by The Nerds.

I was the lucky guy who got to photograph the launch. So enjoy a few Kodak moments. And be sure to check out Nathan and Max at http://www.inkisit.com/.

Max & Nathan welcome Antonio with a shower of rose petals

The Great Unveiling - A cheer goes up as Antonio reveals the printer with a flourish

Antonio extolls the virtues of the new printers

Max & Nathan do the "Ink Dance" as a page prints

All three do a rousing sign-off chanting "Ink is It!"

KODAK EASYSHARE 5100 All-in-One Printer with Media 

How many times do you get the opportunity to invent something that your mom will use everyday, start a design from a clean sheet of paper, hand select your entire team, build from one of the most extensive IP portfolios in the field... and all under the most trusted brand name in the industry and with the unwavering support and downright enthusiasm of the CEO? From the start, this was a once in a lifetime project. Our charter was intuitively compelling, and remained amazingly consistent: develop a line of desktop all-in-one inkjet printers that let consumers make cost-effective, true Kodak lab quality photos and great documents, with one-button simplicity.

A "true" Kodak lab-quality print suggests it can not feel like sandpaper on the back, come out like a wet noodle, or stick to the subsequent print to form a brick. It must have all the attributes that consumers expect with the Kodak brand printed on the back - a crisp image without graininess; vibrant and accurate colors; strong physical durability; permanence for many generations regardless of environmental factors. Achieving this high bar dictated a set of technology choices that comprise our proprietary Kodacolor inkjet technology.

KODAK EASYSHARE 5300 All-in-One Printer

The first choice was to use pigment inks using a proprietary technology to grind them to a breakthrough nano particle uniform size (2.5 billion of our nano particles fit on the 1mm tip of a pin). Why pigments? These are solid plastic particles used in applications like painting cars, whereas dyes are used to color fabrics. Intuitively you can understand why it is more difficult to develop pigment inks, especially when you are firing them 24 thousand times a second in 2.7 picoliter drops (a picoliter equals one trillionth of a liter) out of almost four thousand nozzles in a thermal inkjet printhead.

The second choice reaches back to our heritage in photo paper. To fully realize the capabilities of the Kodacolor pigment ink technology requires a rapid-dry, high-quality photo paper. We designed a family of microporous photo papers that provide prints unsurpassed in overall quality, durability and stability. As in many other areas, we broke the paradigm of requiring the consumer to select the photo paper and print mode setting in order to achieve a real photo. Each of our photo papers has a unique machine readable water mark on the back that is used to optimally, and automatically, configure the printer to give the best result - every photo is a Kodak lab-quality photo.

KODAK EASYSHARE 5500 All-in-One Printer

The third choice was the selection of our printhead architecture that treats the printhead as part of the printer, not a replaceable ink supply. We have a high performance printhead with 3840 nozzles and 2400 nozzels per inch inherent resolution without interpolation. Our printhead architecture uses two different nozzle sizes that produce 2.7 picoliter (pL) and 6.5 pL drop sizes. Two ink cartridges snap into the back - one for text black and one that contains five photo colors of cyan, magenta, yellow, photo black and a clear protective ink. The two tanks are always installed allowing the Kodak All-in-One (with its two paper trays) to print photos, text or mixed graphics documents at all times, without swapping tanks.

The fourth choice was the application of our more than hundred years of Kodak Color and Image Science expertise to determine the specific way of combining the five photo inks, with two different drop sizes, and photo paper in our sophisticated All-in-One printers to provide prints that match the image-quality and color-gamut from devices that use eight to ten color inks. The combination of the high nozzle count printhead, pigment inks, microporous photo paper and image science allowed us to deliver a real Kodak lab-quality photo every time in as little as 28 seconds without making printer settings. We also met an aggressive draft text speed of 32 pages per minute (ppm) with sharp, optically dense text. We will be offering this all at an industry disruptive price - printing will never be the same.

As we stand on the threshold of product launch, it is easy to minimize the many challenges we faced over the three year development (essentially in half the industry standard time). We were a startup within a large corporation; irreverent when the system slowed things down, grateful when the coffers of know-how saved the day. There were times when it seemed that the tides were against us: the technology too complex, the goals too ambitious, the competition too fierce. It was at these times invariably when an unlikely leader emerged from the engineering team, working relentlessly to invent a new way to solve a problem. We started with a passion to give the company a bright future in digital printing; to deliver on the commitment and trust placed by our leadership, CEO, Antonio Perez, and CDG President, Phil Faraci. We progressed by the professional and personal caliber of the team. We completed through a strong commitment to one another.

We have amassed a worldwide team of inkjet experts. We have technology that is leading edge, with future generations already in the works. We intend to always be irreverent against the status quo - why has it cost consumers a fortune for a thimbleful of ink anyway? We are thrilled to finally be able to talk to you about how we intend to change the future of printing...

Check back later today for an additional posting on this exciting product launch.

In the middle of the last decade of the last century (okay, around 1995), a small company named Creo, nestled in a quiet suburb outside Vancouver, Canada, started the development of a piece of software that was designed to change the way printing companies do their work. By and large it has done that, beyond what even the initial visionary team (that would include me) imagined it would.

If you ever tried to have something printed in the past, you would have heard the phrase "camera-ready copy." Through whatever means you desired - scrapbook, glue-gun, scissors and wax, you would bring your piece to the printer who would pin it up on a wall and take a picture of it. After that, the work entered the realm of lithographic film - a world not just of film, developer, and fixer, but of color separation filters, specialized plates of glass for halftone screening and other equipment now making its way into the museums of print.

Most of this changed when "desktop publishing" got a foothold in the print production world as a combination of the Macintosh and the LaserWriter PostScript laser printer. While the prepress areas of print shops had started to replace film workflows, desktop publishing accelerated the speed of adoption since printers had to face customers bringing 3.5" floppy disks with their work on it instead of the ill-fated camera-ready copy. Helping printers cope with the transition away from film to all-digital print production was the task Creo set itself up to do, and Prinergy was the name of the software we developed to accomplish it.

Prinergy was launched in 1999, and since then it has been installed in thousands of printing plants worldwide. Many of the magazines you see on the rack at your local grocery store, including Vanity Fair and Time, are produced through Prinergy systems operated by large printing plants, as are many of the national catalogs you receive this time of year, and many of the flyers that arrive with your daily newspaper.

Prinergy helped printers adapt to the changing world, when digital imaging quickly replaced the film-based workflows they had relied upon for years. Prinergy is now part of Kodak's Graphic Communications Group (GCG), and we're looking forward to continuing the digital momentum of GCG as we develop new software and workflow tools to make communications between people simpler and more effective.