News Room: Inkjet revolution

Frank Cloutier does a frighteningly good imitation of a dot-matrix printer. It involves a lot of rapid-fire noise and a sweeping back-and-forth motion of the entire upper body, something like a heavy machine gun spitting out .50-caliber slugs.

"Can you imagine what offices would be like today," he asks, "if we had hundreds of those printers going?"

In case you're too young to remember, dot-matrix was the dominant printer technology in the early days of desktop computing. Also called serial impact printers, the clattering devices used metal pins to hammer out text, one letter at a time, onto endless accordion-folded reams of perforated computer paper. Users had little or no control over typeface or character size, and graphic images were not an option.

Dot-matrix printers were big, clunky and, above all, loud. While today's office environment is crowded with printers, the laser and inkjet technology prevalent now is far more sophisticated, efficient, versatile --- and blessedly quiet.

To a large extent, you can thank Frank Cloutier for that. The inkjet printer revolution began 20 years ago, right here in Corvallis, with a small team of engineers under Cloutier's supervision at Hewlett-Packard Co.'s local campus.

And remarkably, even though inkjet technology has come a long way since then, their original invention is still in widespread use.

St. Helens erupts

Building on a breakthrough by HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., that used heat to force tiny droplets of liquid through a hole, "Cloutier's Crazies" created the first commercially viable desktop inkjet printer.

The product debuted in 1984 as the HP ThinkJet. Over the next 20 years, it changed the entire industry.

Dot-matrix printers, though not extinct, have faded into the background of the office landscape, while inkjets have become the dominant species of printer in the desktop publishing age.

The heart of the original ThinkJet was the printhead, which wedded ink-aiming computer circuitry to a set of nozzles (the jets) and packaged them with the ink cartridge itself.

The first inkjet printhead was codenamed St. Helens, after the volcano that was so much on the minds of Oregonians in the early '80s.

"St. Helens was something that got hot and spit things out, so there you are," Cloutier said in a recent interview.

The St. Helens had just 12 nozzles for spraying ink. It could produce a maximum image resolution of 96 dots per inch, or not quite as sharp as the type and pictures in this newspaper.

One current HP printhead, model No. 96, has 672 ultrafine nozzles that are capable of producing images of up to 1,200 dpi. That level of quality leapfrogs newspapers and even glossy magazines to rival the finest photographic prints. In fact, if you ask Cloutier, it's superior to prints.

"We got better than magazines several years ago," he said. "Then the question became can we do better than silver halide, and the answer today is yes."

Finding new life

But that doesn't mean the St. Helens is obsolete -- far from it. Sales of the 20-year-old printhead model are nearly as strong today as they've ever been, with scores of manufacturers using it in a host of applications that its HP designers may never even have dreamed of.

Its low cost -- $13.95 for a black St. Helens cartridge versus $70.99 for a black model 12 printhead -- and rugged simplicity make it ideal for a wide range of applications where high reliability is more important than high resolution.

St. Helens printheads -- also known as pens -- are used to print everything from cash register receipts to ski resort lift tickets, from the time-stamped slips you get at the parking garage to the expiration dates on those little plastic thingies that hold bread bags closed.

One of the biggest markets is for automated teller machines, which need a receipt printer that will perform reliably even when exposed to the weather in an outdoor terminal.

"Our estimate is that about 80 percent of the ATMs in the world use a St. Helens pen," said Marcy Eastham, a Hewlett-Packard spokeswoman.

And entrepreneurs keep coming up with new ways to use the product. ViewPlus Technologies, a Corvallis company that makes an innovative line of raised-dot computer printers for blind users, has begun installing St. Helens pens in a new attachment for its Pro Embosser series. The attachment produces plain text and visual graphics side by side with ViewPlus's embossed images, enabling sighted teachers to see exactly what their blind students are working on.

"It does it all in one pass," said Jeff Gardner, vice president of sales and marketing for ViewPlus.

The simple functionality of the St. Helens made it an obvious choice for ViewPlus, which required a printhead that could fire at an angle -- something many of today's more sophisticated inkjet pens just can't do.

"We needed it to shoot up," said Gaby Herden, the company's director of hardware development. "This was the only one that could do it."

Medical researchers are even using old inkjet models to "print" sheets of new skin cells for burn victims.

In Cloutier's view, that's the kind of radical innovation that marks inkjet printing as a truly revolutionary development.

"Any technology that's really a breakthrough will go through a couple of phases," he said.

"In the first phase, it simply replaces the technology that's out there. The second phase is it will create whole new industries."

By Bennett Hall, the business editor for the Gazette-Times.
He can be reached at 758-9529 or hallb@gtconnect.com.
Link to article:
http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2004/08/29/news/community/local01.txt