Printer technology has come a very long way since the days of daisywheels and dot matrix. The photo quality from even a modestly priced consumer inkjet can be pretty amazing.  However, one of the drawbacks is that with many of them, printing a detailed high resolution color picture can take a long time.  

But some new printers from Silverbrook Research might have the competition quaking in their boots.  How does 60 pages per minute sound?  And we’re talking about full bleed standard color pages – one per second.  Bump up to photo quality and you still get 30 pages per minute.  Silverbrook says they can ship such a printer for under $200US by the end of 2008.  

Other models include a $150 photo printer, a label printer and a $5000 large format photo printer which can spit out poster-size prints 20 times faster than anything else currently available.  Oh, and the ink cartridges for these machines supposedly contain five times as much ink as most, and cost about $20.  

It all sounds far too good to be true, but Charlie LeCompte, the president of printer market tracking firm Lyra Research, says he’s seen the prototype demonstrations and it’s all true – he says that in 20 years, he’s never seen anything like this.

You can see a video of several of the new printers doing their thing, and doing it very fast, at Texyt.