1997: TIJ Technology Evangelism

By 1997, the battle among inkjet printer vendors for market share in photo printing was heating up. Epson claimed superiority based on better technology (piezo-electric or "piezo" printheads) and more dots per inch (DPI). To counter those claims, HP's competitive analysis teams worked to understand and characterize image quality and writing system technology similarities and differences. HP Marketing and PR introduced the term PhotoREt II as a catch-all pseudo-brand for HP's technology stack. Epson's simple message of "more DPI" was easier to sell. In fact, HP started the "DPI war" when DPI was an important metric for text printing. It turns out that printing images requires more and smaller drops and the PhotoREt II promise of "perfect automatic color every time."

After spending two years working on the realities of photo printing and image quality, and after getting a lot of visibility for that work inside and outside HP, I was asked to be part of the team that crafted the HP TIJ technology story and then travel around the world as an evangelist. The message was delivered in many forms, and the fundamentals are in a paper that I presented called "Optimal design of desktop photo printing systems" in Imaging Science & Technology, pp.91-5, 1998. Here's that paper's abstract:

This paper will describe the process of designing a desktop photo printing system: printer, ink and media. We will compare recent technology trends in photo printers with respect to the key imaging attributes of system performance (color reproduction, graininess, tone reproduction, image permanence), methods for delivering colorant to the media (drop volume, # of gray levels per pixel, spatial addressability, halftoning), rate of delivery of colorant quanta (firing frequency, nozzle integration, firing chamber volume), and print engine cost per unit throughput.  We shall conclude that Thermal inkjet technology not only remains the most promising inkjet technology, but is quite possibly the most promising digital printing technology over the long term.

Several Powerpoint versions containing many of the ideas are also available. Just Google me. Here are some highlights taken from this presentation:

• Smaller drops allow more colors per dot, lighter tones, and photo-quality printing on a wide variety of media

• Reduced firing chamber dimensions enable smaller ejected drop volumes ejected and higher nozzle packing density

• Smaller drops require less firing energy per drop for increased frequency, higher throughput

• Print head integration on silicon allows integration of both power electronics and per-nozzle interconnect - enables higher throughput and color resolution without excessive system cost and size

My first technology evangelism trip in 1997 was to New York City in June. That was followed by a trip with VJ to Washington, DC, and New York City in July to meet with Walt Mossberg and other journalists. Then a European press tour in August and September had stops in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Vienna, Munich, Paris, Copenhagen, Hanover, and Frankfurt. Along with all of my other HP travel, I flew 57,000 miles.

In 1997, we expanded my Advanced Research Lab team to include Writing Systems Research with this broad mission:

Drive fundamental invention and improvement of the image data stream, pen/printer/customer models, and writing system components to achieve high throughput, high image quality printing systems for IPG customers. Maintain a stable source of image science and writing systems expertise for IJBU R&D.

Our Section's ACE program was making progress on TIJ4 ink and printheads, and we needed expertise in imaging pipelines and testbeds to enable printing high quality images quickly using a single pass (rather than the multiple printhead passes over a given area that were required to hide dot size and trajectory errors in traditional inkjet printing). My new Writing Systems Research team had responsibility for fluid interconnect, closed loop color calibration, single pass image printing testbeds, imaging pipeline research and implementation, low drop volume print mode development, and more competitive analysis.

Life was still good at HP!

Next: 1998: High Throughput and Ultimate Image Quality