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A couple of weeks ago, I covered the new HP printer that HP won’t sell because it fundamentally alters the economics of the printing industry. In the article I implored HP to get ahead of the change in the razor and blade model that has been oh so profitable for printers for the last two decades. I pointed to Kodak’s attempts at breaking that model.

Portfolio, the new business mag from Conde Nast (coverage here), has a blog entry on another company aiming to take down HP and Lexmark. At the end of March an Austrialian R&D company raised the curtain on a new company called Memjet. Per the Press Release (pdf link), Memjet claims that it’s technology can produce full page color prints with inkjet quality at the rate of 60 pages per minute, or 90 pages per minute if you choose draft mode. The printers will retail for under $300 and will “help eliminate the price penalty for printing color”.

Memjet is not a manufacturer, so it will be up to manufacturers to pick up the technology before it will come to market. I can’t imagine it will take too long for this to come to market, if the technology really works.

And therein lies the rub. How does the technology hold up to not printing for a month? Do the ink nozzles clog, rending the cheap tank useless? Will it have the capacity to replace high-usage business printers that print thousands of pages per day?

We can hope that this technology will lead to a breakthrough in printers that will finally break the razor and blade method utilized by the current crop of printers, but it’s hard for a company to break through when there are such large and established players. Will HP, Lexmark, or Canon pick up these printers and disturb their very profitable business model? Will a new company be able to convince consumers that paying more for a printer upfront is better than paying nothing for the printer and then getting gouged on ink?

There’s a lot of hope but also a lot of questions.