Ricoh enters high-volume market

Ricoh, a provider of digital office equipment, has introduced two wide-format digital imaging systems with colour scanning capability, the Aficio MP W5100 and MP W7140, according to PRNewswire.

These products signify the company's entry into the high-volume, wide-format marketplace, which is classified as any wide-format machine capable of producing outputs at 10 pages per minute or more.

Combining fast output speeds, user simplicity and smart engineering, the Aficio MP W5100 and MP W7140 enable users to handle large, highly-detailed job sets quickly and streamline document workflow.

Strong reception for Amazon's Kindle e-book is attracting a growing number of developers looking to tap into interest in paper-saving devices that let consumers read newspapers, magazines and books in a digital form that updates wirelessly, reports canada.com.

Sony has joined the paperless wave with its own e-readers, partnering with Google to offer public domain books that are no longer protected by copyright.

Other believers in the dawn of a paperless age include Taiwan's Netronix, which is making similar models with touch-screens, and Dutch Polymer Vision, set to soon introduce a pocket e-reader with rollable displays.

The defence market leverages new technologies and new materials for smaller, faster, cheaper imagers in the mid-wave and long-wave IR spectral regions, reports Advanced Imaging Pro.

Information is as much a weapon as ordnance. Small wonder, then, that defence imaging is an active area of development. The technology has gone far beyond the short-wave IR night-vision goggles of yesteryear.

Today, cutting-edge systems are leveraging materials like amorphous silicon and carbon nanotubes to image over the mid-wave IR and long-wave IR spectral bands.