There's nothing quite like Memjet's colour printing technology when it's going at full pelt. Almost as soon as the paper has entered the machine, it is coughed out the other end, resplendent with colour pictures and graphics. And the pages are dry to the touch almost instantly too. Clearly pixie magic is at work...

Well, not quite. After all, you try rounding up five pixies, one for each colour, and bribing them to sit inside a plastic shell day and night. It's not easy, for starters, there's the unions to worry about.

Instead, Memjet uses more than 70,000 ink nozzles on a single printhead, 17 times that of conventional inkjet printers. Plus, its printhead is 222.8mm wide, spanning the width of an A4 page, so it doesn't need to whizz back and forth like with many of its peers and rivals. The end result is that the Memjet technology can deliver more than 700 million drops of ink per second onto a page.

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Therefore, a Memjet powered printer can print 60 full colour, 1600 x 800 dpi pages a minute, one per second. It's like watching the beginning of any movie that starts with a spinning newspaper and a printing press.

The company also states that the nearest rivals can get to its technology is 30 pages per minute (full colour), 60 pages per minute (black and white). It claims that this new system is the world's fastest.

Certainly, from our demonstration at CES 2011, Pocket-lint hasn't seen anything quicker. And we're thoroughly impressed by the evenness and accuracy of its colour rendition.

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The only problem is that it won't be in the shops for a while, not in the UK at least. While Memjet has devised the technology itself, it's no manufacturer, so needs to partner with existing brands. So far, it has signed deals with computer manufacturer Lenovo for the Chinese market, Kpowerscience for Taiwan (who will be branding its printer WinJet), and WeP Peripherals for India. There are no announcements for the British Isles or the US at present.

However, from what we've seen, it'll only be a matter of time before somebody jumps on the Memjet tech, and we'll bring you more info as and when we get it.

Is speed everything, or does price matter more? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below...