Posted by Nils Miller, PhD, HP Ink Chemist

Each June, for the past 8 years, I’ve traveled to Europe to participate in the HP Lab University – an enormous press event, with several hundred journalists from Europe and the Middle East. This annual event gives engineers and chemists from HP an opportunity to speak directly to journalists about the technology and design decisions that shape HP imaging and printing products.

As you’d expect, many of the sessions in this week-long event focus on explaining the benefits of new or about-to-be-announced products. But particularly interesting to me – and many of the journalists – are the portions of the event that really get into the basic technology questions. For example, in a past event an HP digital camera expert  explained the main types of camera lens designs available in the industry today, and the inherent advantages and disadvantages of each. Or I’ve explained what ‘pigment’ inks and ‘dye-based’ inks are, and the challenges of designing a printer (and paper) around different ink technologies. 

Often these types of discussions – which, really, have more in common with a classroom setting than a press event – end up focusing on the optimization decisions that HP ink chemists and printer engineers are forced to make. Will having eight inks improve photo image quality? Well, yes, but it makes the printer larger and more expensive, and might be overkill for the typical home printing customer. What about drop size – smaller is better, right? Well, not necessarily. Most customers want a versatile printer that combines good photo image quality and fast, vibrant plain paper printing – and in fact a too-small inkjet drop will not deliver that combination well.

So for a couple of years I’ve been thinking it would be great if I could find a way to let the journalists become ink chemists and printer engineers for two hours, and design their own printer – and then see how it would perform. Something that would allow them to make their own tradeoff and optimization decisions. Some sort of ‘Virtual Printer’ computer program needed to be created that would allow them to plug in their engineering decisions (size of the droplets, the number of inks, size of the printhead, that sort of thing) and then see a realistic prediction of how the printer would perform on key customer attributes – speed, print quality, cost per print, size and cost of the printer, and so on. And the class would have to start with instructional demonstrations so that the journalists could then make informed engineering decisions (not guesses).

The 2007 HP Lab University event was the 10th such event and was held in Lisbon, Portugal 

I worked with three other experts from HP, and together in two months time we created the Design a Print System (DaPS) module.

Matt Thornberry helped create five ink sets that the journalists would choose from; Steve Castle helped with the crucial task of creating the mathematical equations that predict the customer attributes based on the engineering inputs and traveled to Lisbon to help conduct the session. Matt Bonner was the programmer who put this all together into software. Since DaPS contains proprietary equations that reflect HP’s 20+ years of printer design experience, Steve and I couldn’t actually give the DaPS software to the journalists, but we could give them a printout showing how their printer would perform.

This screen shot of the printout, below, shows the engineering inputs on the left, and the predicted performance (on a 1-10 scale, 10 being ‘Best’) for the various customer attributes:

Detail from DaPS per-Team Screen

Most of these terms are self-explanatory, but some require explanation. In the next blog installment I’ll do that explaining, and go over what design decisions the journalists made and what they learned from the session.
 
Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not of HP and may not have been reviewed in advance by HP.