High Speed Array Printhead: In the early 1990s, Iris Graphics made the only photograph quality inkjet printers in the world. They used CMYK color and the continuous inkjet technology developed almost 100 years before by Professor Hertz of Sweden's Lund Institute. They also cost more than a Porsche Carrera 4 and took 5 minutes to create one B sized print.

I was the only engineer working on advanced research, and we believed that as other color technologies got cheaper and better looking, Iris would have to come out with a lower cost product that was significantly faster.

I designed this printhead to test a silicon array jet technology. Instead of 4 drawn glass nozzles, this printhead had 32 micromachined nozzles. My research showed that clean jets fired straighter and that submerged jets stayed cleaner, so I made the nozzle array servo down into a wash basin when not printing.

This printhead showed some promise because it could put ink on paper so much faster than anything in the building. In fact it could move ink so fast that there was no way to supply the image data at that pace. Unfortunately, Iris' parent company was more interested in squeezing out maximum immediate profit and this project required long term determination.