Xerox announced a breakthrough printer yesterday that uses solid ink cubes rather than liquid ink tanks to produce color and black copies. The new multifunction printer is the ColorCube 9200 series and the solid inks promise to lower the environmental impact of office printing.

The cartridge free design uses 90% less supplies and reduces waste compared to traditional tanks. The solid ink sticks are like crayons according to Xerox. The printer uses a hybrid color plan that allows documents to be printed and users only pay for the color they need. Text pages with a small company logo will cost about one penny to print.

Each of the print heads in the printer has jets that can shoot more than 150 million drops of ink per second providing print speeds of 38 ppm up to 85 ppm. The solid ink sticks can print up to 55,500 pages before needing to be replaced. The catch is the list price for the new printer series starts at $23,500.

Via Xerox