Printers, I think we can agree with some relief, are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Still, plenty of people have the hulking old things plugged in somewhere in their homes, and Mattel’s gonna put ‘em to use. For printing real (fake) hair extensions for you and your Barbie. More »
Gaping battlefield flesh wounds that take off more than 4 cm if skin can’t heal without aid, so researchers at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine created a fantastical system that literally prints skin on demand. More »
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that inkjet printers are good for anything other than ripping you off, but news today from HP’s own intellectual property czar may change that: the technology that regulates the precise mixture of pigments down to the last picoliter will soon make home kidney dialysis machines more accurate by regulating mixtures of dialysis fluid with similar accuracy.
Over at NextFest, we came across an entire tree’s worth of Xerox’s cartridge-less solid ink, a technology we’d heard about but never seen in person. They feel more like a hard, textured plastic than a waxy crayon (which is its most touted analogy), and the ink doesn’t rub off in your hand at all. And yes, Xerox, we’ll be happy to buy your product that reduces ink waste by 90% if you’d kindly release it to the market.
This new photo-printer from Casio is one mixed-up gizmo: As well as standard photo-printing functions, it’s got a 7-inch touchscreen and a full keyboard. So is it a mini computer with printer aspirations, or a printer with computing aspirations? Hard to say, but it’s supposedly able to edit the photos you pop in from a memory card or mobile phone, and produce custom greetings cards, calendars and the like. And it comes with hundreds of built-in stamps and illustrations. You’d better be seriously into DIY greetings though: the PCP-1200 costs a whacking US$500 in Japan. [Far East Gizmos]
Trusted Reviews has a big investigation on inkjet printers and inkjet ink, and their year-long study comparing fading between more expensive manufacturer brand vs. the cheaper crappy brand shows that you get what you pay for. Over three months, the differences between the two were negligible, with pages only fading slightly (but noticeably) in quality.
I can’t say that I have ever been impressed by a printer, but the device they are cooking up at Kyocera could be a first. Their new KJ4 series printhead can churn out up to 200 metres per minute at 600 x 480 dpi, or 150 meters per minute at 600×600 dpi—which equates to about 1000 sheets of A4. After consulting a calculator, I determined that is nearly 17 pages a second.
Ars Technica has the scoop on some new research that shows how it would be possible to print thin film transistors (TFTs) — that is the technology used for LCD screens — using inkjet technology. The inkjet effectively “prints” the silver wiring used in the TFTs.
It’s all very theoretical for now, but if it can be made to work, it might make the manufacture of LCDs considerably cheaper. [Ars Technica]
Designer Hung Chih Wang thinks the inkjet printer market has room for an ultra-mobile concept: his “Trak” design is a mini printer that snaps onto the lid of your laptop. Handy for hardcopies on-the-go, it’s small enough to be USB powered and even has a detachable print head for easy travel storage. There’s no mention of how you keep the ink from spilling in your bag, but that should please those dollar-craving ink manufacturers, eh? [Yanko design]
Scientists at the University of Tokyo have developed a new 1mm thick plastic sheet inkjet-printed with various nanoparticles and insulating and semiconducting polymers that enables electronic devices placed on it to communicate with one another. A technology like this would have advantages over other means of short-range wireless communication (like Bluetooth) because it is inherently more secure and power efficient. More »
