Yesterday in a fancy press briefing, Epson told us all about where they plan to take printing in the next few years and the technology they are developing to do it. They also took the time to unveil a couple of new products too.
Where they plan to take printing is simple. They want printing to be available anywhere in the home (with its portable printers), and available any time you want it, quickly and easily. With technology like Micro Piezo printheads they are turning inkjet printing from slow and inaccurate to super quick and razor-sharp, and available fade-free for 200 years.
They also told us that they aren't planning to revolutionise printing by themselves - they are working with a series of other manufacturers (such as Noritzo) to develop products for large-scale manufacturers and we have already seen how they have linked up with Panasonic to create the idea of 16:9 format widescreen printing - complete with widescreen paper.
Epson announced a fair amount of new printers too, both large format and portable printers, and two new portable photo viewers - showing us that the market for these is back (Canon announced one yesterday). More details of these are in the following article.
Epson described the technologies it uses in printing, Micro Piezo printheads, Claria photographic ink, Photo Enhance and Photo Fine Ultra. An outline of these is below, helping us to print faster and better photos.
Micro Piezo Printheads
These tiny ink heads use precisely controlled impulses to create perfect, identical droplets as the head moves across the page. Inkjet has always been seen as imprecise, with ink droplets being slightly out of place or smudged and quality suffering as a result. These small printheads however have the ability to create a perfect straight line of colour as it moves, allowing near perfect colours and tones (especially as 5 different sizes of droplet can be created). While Micro Piezo doesn't sound that interesting, it is something that Epson has created to allow us to print without the fear of poor quality printing (and then the hassle of re-printing). This technology is in all its new printers as standard.
Claria Photographic Ink
Leave anything in the sun for a long period of time, even for a few hours a day, and the colours will begin to noticably fade. Its a problem that affects anything and some colours more than others (especially red) but Epson are determined to slow this process. Claria photographic ink has been developed to protect images from fading for at least 200 years, working on the idea of giving the colour more dye atoms to protect it. Whatever the method, the advantage is immediate, allowing you to hang photos in harsh sunlight and still be as perfect as the day it was printed.
Photo Enhance
Photo Enhance is touted as a photography expert in your printer, and it brings the world of in-camera or computer editing to your printer. Photo Enhance is designed to work with crop or red-eye removal functions and works on what it detects in the photo. If it detects people then those areas will be analysed for skin tones and then improved, allowing more accurate natural colours. If it sees a landscape, then colours will be improved to become more vibrant. All this is developed to help Epson in its aim to make printing available anywhere, this technology allowing you to remove the process of improving colours in Photoshop by letting you do it on the printer instead.
Photo Fine Ultra
This technology debuts in the two photo viewers Epson announced. The LCD no longer works in 3 colours - red, green and blue - but now in four. The "Emerald" colour, first seen in Sony's F828 is back, and the sensor now has Red, Yellow/Green, Blue and Emerald. This all means that colour is reproduced more accurately on LCD , allowing you to pick the better photos more easily.
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