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Researchers Devise New Printing Technique To Produce High-Resolution Color Images Without Using Ink (gizmodo.com) 55
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark have taken inspiration from creatures like butterflies and peacocks, whose wings and feathers create bright, iridescent colors not through light-absorbing pigments, but by bending and scattering light at the molecular level, creating what's known as structural color. The new printing method the team has developed starts with sheets of plastic covered in thousands of microscopic pillars spaced roughly 200 nanometers apart. To get those tiny plastic pillars to produce color, or at least appear to, they're first covered with a thin layer of germanium -- a shiny, grayish-white metalloid material. An ultra-fine laser blasts the germanium until it melts onto each pillar, strategically changing their shape and thickness (Editor's note: original research paper). This is then followed by a protective coating that helps preserves the shape and structure of all those tiny pillars. When light hits this modified plastic surface, the lightwaves bounce around amongst the various pillars, which end up changing their wavelength as they're reflected, producing different colors. The researchers were able to predict what colors would be produced by those nanoscale pillars, and by creating specific patterns, they were able to generate recognizable, high-contrast images.
What weird world was this written in? (Score:2)
WTF? 300-600 dpi is the actual state of the art - perhaps 1200 at the outside. Somebody doesn't have a clue in hell about the technology.
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Annoying mixed units (Score:3)
They seem to be comparing dots per inch with dots per square inch, but I think what they really did is leave out the "square" in the comparison.
If they mean 5000 dots per square inch for a inkjet printer, that's 71 dots per inch.
For comparison, "127,000 dots per square inch" comes to ... 356 dots per inch.
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That is the popular press summary's fault.
From the actual research paper:
"Our particular case with a 200-nm pitch translates into a resolution in excess of 120,000 dots per inch (DPI)."
That's 14.4 billion
Clearly Not (Score:2)
Printers can do way better than 71 dots per inch.
They're talking about scan lines. DPI is the standard unit for printer and scanner quality
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They ARE NOT mixing things up.
Yes they are.
The article:
"Your average desktop inkjet can produce images with a resolution of around 5,000 dots per inch. Laser printers, which use a fine powder called toner, can muster a resolution closer to 20,000 dots per inch. But this new technology can generate detailed images with an astonishing resolution of 127,000 dots crammed into a single square inch"
They are trying to compare "dots per inch with "dots crammed into a single square inch."
2,5400,000 nm / 200 nm = 127,000 nm DPI
If that had been what they said, that would be accurate. B
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For commercial-scale printing, 600 DPI is the state of the art. 300 DPI is still in use. But for low-volume printing (e.g. home and commercial small laser printers), the state of the art is about 9600x2400 DPI. Even my near-decade-old Konica Minolta is 9600x600 DPI, so 600 DPI in the page feed direction, 9600 DPI going across the page. So they're off, but not by nearly
Sounds promising (Score:2)
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What is the archival quality/life expectancy of these new prints compared to the best archival printing we currently have?
Unless you're wanting to print "snapchat" type stuff that only lasts a short period, this is an important quality.
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Without any firsthand knowledge of anything but the butterfly wings that they used as a model, my guess would be that it lasts forever as long as nothing touches it, and about a nanosecond if something does. :-) If you've ever touched a butterfly's wings and gotten powder all over your hands, you know why I'm so skeptical.
But if those nanoscale structures are actually robust somehow, then this could be pretty cool.
Cost per page? Other stats... (Score:3)
So how huge is a printer like this. (yes, I know it's a prototype, but...)
How thick are the pages with their tiny crystal towers?
How much does it cost per page?
Do the colors shift when you bend the page?
Can you even bend the page?
Is boosting the resolution by a factor of 2.5 in each direction even visible to the human eye?
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Do you work in sales?
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I don't know. I read the article but I'm guessing:
I doubt the "paper" is very thick, It probably wouldn't work if the paper was thick, has to be thin for the tiny crystal towers, if they were tall, I imagine colour would look wrong from an angle... The printer will probably not end up being much larger, again I don't know, but lasers can be pretty compact, think of your Sony Discman... or rather travel back to 1990 and think of your Sony Discman.
I think the biggest problem: how much does the "paper" cost.
Re:Color Accuracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you see the unbelievably life-like color in those samples? The shot of the Taj Mahal is especially stunning.
Have you ever seen the first photograph ever taken? If I recall, it was a view looking out a window in France. It looks like a swirl of grey with almost no definition. Certainly, unless you're specifically told what you're looking at, no one would ever guess.
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I use a black & white monitor, you insensitive clod!
(I'm reminded of a comedian's comment on the waste of advertising color television sets on television: "If you have a black and white TV, you can't see the color. If you have a color TV, you can't see how much better the color is. And if you have their color TV, they already won you over!")
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I use a black & white monitor, you insensitive clod!
(I'm reminded of a comedian's comment on the waste of advertising color television sets on television: "If you have a black and white TV, you can't see the color. If you have a color TV, you can't see how much better the color is. And if you have their color TV, they already won you over!")
That's why color TVs were displayed in shop windows. So people walking by could see the difference. Plus, in those days commercials were pretty much limited to soap and brill cream... At least, that's what I get from watching old black and white TV shows.... Today it's drugs and car commercials...
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And cigarettes. Lots and lots of cigarettes.
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Something seems off about the resolution comments in this post. 127,000 dots per square inch only works up to 356.37 dots per linear inch. Laser printers have had 300 dots per linear inch resolution since the late 1980s. Somebody tell me what I'm missing here... thanks!
Color laser printers tend to do worse than B&W ones for resolution.
What do you mean, "appear to"? (Score:2)
To get those tiny plastic pillars to produce color, or at least appear to
If it appears to produce colour, then it's producing colour. That's what colour is...
Inches??? (Score:1)
127,000 dpi, what's with the archaic units? Roughly 200 nm/dot?
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You are way wrong, and so is the fluff tech news article. You need to look at the paper.
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127,000 dpi, what's with the archaic units? Roughly 200 nm/dot?
Which asshole modded that down? In fact my estimate was bang on, according to Figure 1B. [sciencemag.org] Sheesh. What happened to the quality of Slashdot readers? Well there is a bright side: when you kids get to high school you will at least have some technical exposure.
Re: Inches??? (Score:1)
The quality of slashdot readers is slightly lower but the quantity is much greater.
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And so nother hopeful candidate steps up for the 'how clueless can I sound after not reading the paper" award.
Okay So the 'ink' is built into the 'paper'. (Score:1)
Still sounds expensive with all these layers you need to do the job.
No ink, but also no paper... (Score:3)
Since this technology is fundamentally incompatible with regular paper, it is going to be an expensive niche product.
They talk about making the plastic sheets reusable, which is the only way I see this technology being generally useful. But then they have to worry about printing onto used, degraded media.
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Well I make prints without ink - I have a darkroom so make traditional B&W silver prints. The 'specially treated paper' I use costs less per page than fancy paper for an inkjet printer.
For example, I can get Ilford RC paper in 12*16 inches for £1 per page (£50 for 50 sheets), whilst ilford galerie prestige A3 sheets cost £1.70 per page (£44 for 25 sheets). The 'ink' equivalent is included in the paper for darkroom printing, so there are no additional running costs for making a pr
Thermal color printing has been around for awhile (Score:1)
Color printing with the "special sauce" already baked into the paper has been around for awhile. ZINK paper is sold under the Polaroid brand name; it's used for making instant photos from digital sources.
The problem these type of technologies suffer from is that plain paper and ink is already ridiculously cheap to manufacture. A sheet of paper with a special coating covering its entire surface is always going to cost more per print.
Hmmm (Score:2)
*Double-checks the periodic table and inventory* Uh, isn't this one of those elements we are chronically in short supply of? I mean, one hand, an increase in demand can lead to an increase in supply, but on the other hand...fairly certain we were restricting use of this one to building satellites & that kind of stuff...or with our movement back to coal as an energy source do we no longer care about that?
Hopefully not PVC (Score:2)
It could pose a health risk depending on the type of plastic and the reactions that occur under heat and UV. For example, Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) could potentially react to Germanium to produce Germanium Tetrachloride. Although I suspect if it were PVC, simply burning it would be more dangerous and release chlorine gas.
I suspect these sheets will be another case of plastic that cannot be recycled. If you ever tried to recycle overhead transparency sheets, you'll find nobody will take them. They are a blend
For those who think that printer ink is too cheap (Score:2)
If I were those researchers, I would have spoken of potential use cases not quite competing with ordinary laser printers.