Video is great, but the world really still runs on paper, right? 

The inventor of the inkjet printer was a guy named Stephen Sears, whom I knew half a lifetime ago in California.  Steve Sears worked at IBM and enjoyed a small royalty from that early inkjet patent.  I have no idea where he is today, but he must be amazed to see how far his little invention has gone, thanks to Moore's Law.

That original inkjet printer, as I recall it, was monochrome and had a print head with a total of seven or nine nozzles stacked vertically.  Maybe you remember those early printers.  They were fast for their time and cheap but of course the printing was terrible.  This week we have announced the logical 21st century extension of inkjet technology, the Silverbrook Research MemJet printer featuring a print head that's as wide as the paper it prints on.  We're talking 70,400 photolithographed nozzles and 900 MILLION drops-per-second.  This is a $200 printer, remember, that is supposed to use $20 ink cartridges ($0.06 per color page) while printing full color pages at 60 pages-per-minute!

Silverbrook is an R&D company based in Sydney, Australia and run by the former head of Canon's Australian R&D operation.  They don't actually make printers, of course, but license technologies.  So we can expect to see printers very much like this reach the market in another year or so.