Even though naysayers are forecasting the demise of the photocopying industry, Xerox pushed ahead Thursday with their (unfortunately spelled) ColorQube 9200 series which uses solid ink sticks in place of the cartridges in all-in-one workstations.

Blast attended an online press conference to learn the details from Xerox.

The energy savings with the ColorQube are substantial. Apart from the industry standard Energy Star compliance, the ColorQube’s solid ink sticks require only packaging; they’re deposited straight into the copier, without the typical plastic housing of a toner cartridge. For example savings—and this is Xerox’s statistic—imagine an office that prints the complete works of Shakespeare (about 2000 pages) eleven times over a month for four years. This office would produce 815 pounds of solid printer waste! With the ColorQube, the office would have only produced 88 pounds — a rather solid 90 percent reduction. Granted, this statistic is a little extreme, but it goes to show how far smart product design and packaging can go.

The ColorQube also detects the amount of color used on a page, and charges accordingly. Instead of getting charged the same amount for a page that contains a colored headline as a full color photo print, the ColorQube breaks down copies into different tiers that cost differing amounts, which will certainly be a boon to any office that does frequent color copies.

The rest of the specs for the ColorQube are standard for a high-end multi-function machine: 50 pages per minute color, 80 in black, IPv6 networking via Ethernet, 58,000 page capacity for the solid ink sticks, and so on.

It’s certainly nice to see a company as big as Xerox show some concern for environmental thought with how often people through the word “green” around these days.

The new MFC-5890CN networked all-in-one does the copying, scanning and faxing — which we’re cool with — but the big deal about this bad boy is that it also lets you make 11″ X 17″ prints for just $199.

Brother threw out a few other models Wednesday also, including the $129, networked MFC-5490CN that does up to legal-sized prints. There’s also the MFC-6490CW, which lets you do all of the above, including 11-by-17’s for $299.

We’re looking at September/October for these bad boys.