Specifications

Solid-Ink Printers
I’ve become somewhat jaded in this business; it takes something really astounding to get me excited.
Well, excited is exactly how I felt when I discovered the secret to truly usable and functional color
printing—that is, color printing that would have the speed and low cost of monochrome and yet be
capable of printing in full color as easily as black and white, with none of the standard color draw-
backs of inkjet or color laser printers. The secret I’m referring to is solid-ink printing, developed origi-
nally by Tektronix and now owned by Xerox.
Solid-ink printing was first developed by Tektronix in 1992, and although one or two other compa-
nies played with the technology, Tektronix is the only company that remained committed to making
it work. In 1998 and 1999, it completely revised its product line and came out with some revolution-
ary products. It received 35 patents on its latest product, the Phaser 850 printer family. So revolution-
ary is its designs that it caught the attention of Xerox, which purchased the color printer division of
Tektronix just to get the technology and patent portfolio. As it stands, Xerox is currently the only
source for this type of printer. With an initial cost less than that of most color laser printers (about
$2,500 to start for the upgrade-ready 850N model at 800dpi), and the low cost of the consumables,
solid-ink is not only the best color printing technology I’ve seen, but weighing cost versus benefits,
it’s by far the most economical.
How Solid-Ink Printers Work
Solid-ink technology uses blocks of wax that are dropped into a loading tray and melted internally in
the printer. When printing, the colored inks are sprayed onto a drum and then transferred to the
page, much like a monochrome laser would work. The main difference between solid-ink and color
laser, though, is that with solid-ink only one drum is used and all the colors are applied simultane-
ously to the drum with a special print head. The result is printing that is fully four times faster than
color laser, with printing that looks incredibly smooth and saturated—due to the natural blending of
the colors as they are applied.
Not only is the solid-ink printer four times faster than a color laser when printing in color, but it is
also faster when initiating the print job. A typical color laser, such as the HP 4500, takes approxi-
mately 36 seconds to print the first page, whether you are printing in monochrome or color.
Conversely, the solid-ink Xerox 850 takes about 12 seconds for the first page to print. Part of this is
because of the use of a high-speed, 200MHz PowerPC processor inside the printer, which is faster than
most other printers on the market.
Print Quality
Although solid-ink is technically a dot-level technology just like laser or even inkjet, the resolution is
incredibly fine (1200dpi), and the natural blending of the melted ink renders beautifully saturated
and vibrant colors with virtually no trace of dithering. The printing has an almost raised quality to it,
similar to how some business cards are printed in raised ink. This is because the ink is actually wax,
which is not just coating the paper but becomes embedded in it. The printed result is durable and
impervious to water (unlike inkjet printing). Heat can be a concern, but the ink melts at a relatively
high temperature of 165° F, which wouldn’t be experienced under normal circumstances. Still, you
might be careful about leaving print jobs in a locked car in the summer, where temperatures that high
are common.
To see how revolutionary solid-ink printing really is, you must compare it to the other color printing
technologies. In virtually every area solid-ink has them all beat. Take speed, for example. A color laser
printer is four times slower than a monochrome laser for the simple reason that four complete laser
mechanisms exist inside the printer and the paper must travel through all of them to pick up the