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Color Printing Reaches Its Ultimate Resolution
ananyo writes "The highest possible resolution images — about 100,000 dots per inch — have been achieved, and in full-colour, with a printing method that uses tiny pillars a few tens of nanometres tall. The method could be used to print tiny watermarks or secret messages for security purposes, and to make high-density data-storage discs. Each pixel in these ultra-resolution images is made up of four nanoscale posts capped with silver and gold nanodisks. By varying the diameters of the structures (which are tens of nanometres) and the spaces between them, it's possible to control what colour of light they reflect. As a proof of principle, researchers printed a 50×50-micrometre version of the 'Lena' test image, a richly coloured portrait of a woman that is commonly used as a printing standard (abstract). Even under the best microscope, optical images have an ultimate resolution limit, and this method hits it."
...cost 10 times the printer itself.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899.
You can read higher resolutions with atomic scopes etc, and you can create images other than with lenses, so I don't think we've hit the limit yet, unless there's something in TFA about sticking dots on quarks or something...
Feminine beauty is not well served by zoomable acres of gaping pores. Therein lies horror, and quite possibly a counter-Darwinian response insalubrious to human survival.
Those things would not be Color printing. In fact, you could view this process as monochrome too, except when the comparitively long wavelength visible light hits it, it acts in a similar way to a pigmint (well, diffraction isn't exactly the same, but similar enough).
> 'Lena' test image
Pr0n, driving tech development since cavemen fingerpainted a wall.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
APK himself would be at the top of a sensible person's ban list. He's been spamming and trolling Slashdot for years.
I don't get it anyway. Is that some spam that is trying to sell anything?
Even if I were interested, I wouldn't know what or how to buy. It reads like Time Cube to me.
It should be possible to print colour holograms if they get the resolution high enough.
Reality? In my Slashdot? But but but technology and private space elevators! NO LIMITS!
I wonder if 100 years from now we'll still be using an image from playboy as a test image, or if they will have found something better by then.
This just hits the resolution limit for color printing that includes red. It is possible to make color images with just greens, blues and violets at a higher resolution, it just wouldn't count as full color. Researchers could go to even higher resolutions, if they just use blues and violets, but they wouldn't be able to render a very convincing human flesh tone. Competition will start shortly, for the smallest smurf vision display.
Pigmint, huh. Isn't that the pork rind they leave on your pillow at night at a Motel 6 in the south? :)
Even under the best microscope, optical images have an ultimate resolution limit, and this method hits it.
And the linked Wikipedia article quoth:
With green light around 500nm the Abbe limit is 250nm.
That's a bit more than 100,000 dpi. Visible light goes down to 380 nm (~133,000 dpi), so you'll never see anything smaller by optical means.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
It reads like Time Cube to me.
Yes, but it is missing that all important ingredient.. the background wallpaper that makes your brain hurt.
Buy it used? I just got one of the old compact laser printers for 10 bucks off craigslist.
If you don't care about size, I recommend networked color laser printers. No more clogged printheads, no more quirky drivers that break every other release (they speak PostScript), usually at least 5 PPM in color even for the small ones, and the bigger ones will do as much as 25 PPM in full color. Of course, they don't cost $50, but you also don't pay $50 in ink every time you need to refill the thing. (Okay, so you pay a couple hundred bucks in toner, but for home use, you refill the thing every five years instead of every month or two, so it works out to being a lot cheaper.) And instead of replacing the whole thing every couple of years when the print head finally gives up the ghost, you'll still be using the same color laser printer in a couple of decades.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I worked for years in the DTP and pre-press market back in the 1980's and 1990's. The best hardcopy printers (not pre-press) that we had available at the time were Tektronix dye-sublimation and Firey 2000 inkjet printers. Mere 300 LPI flatbed scanners with a gamma of 4.0 were supplanted by 400 LPI analog drum scanners with a gamma of 4.8+. Color matching became critical to the conversion from RGB to CMYK for pre-press. Quality printing began with 600 LPI 4 color mask process and advanced from there in LPI and color layers. Special monitors and calibration equipment were used to age-adjust old-fashioned phosphor monitors. Reliance upon SGI computers and then Apple computers spelled the death-knell for special purpose graphics systems such as Genigraphics, and then eventually with SGI. And PostScript, WTF is that?
Today, even pre-press is a dying industry, along with most print magazines. The only segment of the industry that appears to still be thriving is the soft porn men's magazines, from which the OP's test image originated. But I can assure the /. readers that a photo from a magazine is hardly an adequate test source for scanned images let alone high resolution print, since the image has already been massaged through the RGB > CMYK process and then the screening process (color separated dots, not pixels). OTOH, original analog photographs taken under controlled studio conditions, then printed in a computer-controlled darkroom is/was the standard. This printer may, or may not, be as good as advertised but the testing paradigm is highly dubious. Swapping analog film lens flare for digital moire patterns is not, IMHO, an advancement in print technology. And Kodak, WTF is that? No wonder that quality print industry has departed the USA, now done in Germany and to a lesser degree Japan.
Kids these days just don't know diddley squat ... now, get the heck off my lawn !!
After all, the so-called retina display is at the limits of what the eye can see.
Which is complete bullshit. Apple's so-called retina display is around 300 dpi.
Waaaay back in the early 1980s when HP came out with the world's first laser printer, everyone was blown away by printing at 300 dpi.
It didn't take long for laser printers to progress further, to 600 dpi and then 1200 dpi, because 300 dpi ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH. Printing at 300 dpi is still jagged.
And professionally printed magazines (such as Newsweek) are printed at close to 2400 dpi.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's displays are nice to look at (aside from the glossy thing), but Apple has a long way to go if they want to make an actual retina display.
Color printing reaches the diffraction limit- not the ultimate resolution. People have been pushing the bar with respect to what can be detected with light microscopy, and in fact it is possible to use various new techniques to break the diffraction limit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_resolution_microscopy
-AW
I always get into discussions with my customers (30+ year photocopier/printer/computer tech) about their machines, and printing resolution. 99% of the time, I tell them just to print word docs in draft mode, and save the toner for something else, and print in a lower resolution. Most of the time the stuff they print ends up in the shredder in the first place. For some odd reason, they think they need to print 600x600 in photo quality all the time. Yeah, good for my business since they use more toner, but kind of stupid and wasteful. With the crap paper most people try to shove through a modern copier these days, they are lucky it prints in the first place. Why someone wants to run the cheapest paper, then ends up throwing enough of it away in paper jams, to justify running the better paper is another one that makes you scratch your head. Paper got "cheap" in the mid 80's and hasn't been the same since. They run dual purpose paper, that is meant to run in ink jets & photocopiers, then leave the stuff sitting in a non climate controlled area (warehouse) and complain when it comes out curled because it has sucked up enough moisture to fill a cup of water. End users....well, if it wasn't for them I guess I wouldn't have anything to do, but come on people, use a LITTLE common sense will ya?
I LOL'd.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Personally I liked the 3M Rainbow DyeSub printers, they used the same colour encoding as their Matchpoint chem proofing systems.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
...as in an inkjet printer that doesn't clog up from dried up ink, so it it has a lifetime of over a year.
Until then, I'll stick with lasers. Even if it's just b/w.
How is the archival quality? Does it break down? Will this someday replace the Giclée print as the method for find art printing?
Don't give away those secrets. About a year and ha half a go I finally convinced my wife that we didn't need an inkjet printer as all the photo printing we did was done at Target, or at her father's house for really large stuff (he has one of the pro level ink jets for the art he does) so why not get a color laser for the few things in color we needed to print in color and all the black and white stuff. Her jaw dropped at the initial price (about 4x the cost of a good inkjet), but then we are still on the starter toner cartridges that don't dry out. Early next year we will break even.
Time to offend someone
Mod this up.
The back and forth multi posting between APK and this "anti-APK" certainly does look like APK talking to himself.
/. mod system is flawed, obviously. Humar is not allowed. Illogical. Illogical. Does not compute. I have da assburgers syndrome. I am a robot. I wish I were trolling mars wit my bot opportunity.
The DTP / pre-press shop I worked in also sold the equipment we used. I remember seeing the 3M DyeSub printers at trade shows but never had any hands-on experience with them. IIRC, they were an option on some of the Genigraphics systems. The specs were quite good as I recall, and looked a bit like the Kodak DyeSub printer.
We also used Matrix Digital Film Recorders (8K 8x10 back) and Linotronic Typesetting Printers, did video out to VTRs and CDROM, graphics design, web page development, plus had our own professional photo lab. I was production assistant and hands-on technical support on all the equipment, plus the IT guy handling our administrative & production Novell file servers and rolled out our dial-in Linux FTP server. Never a dull moment, for 10 to 12 hours per day. My favorite computers were SGI Indigo2 and ChallengeXL machines used for video animation, just for the sublime user interface and rock solid stability.
Damn, I must be getting old ...
With near field optics, you could see things much smaller than the wavelength. Even with practical limitations, current technology can sometimes see with resolution and order of magnitude or two below the wavelength. The only catch is it requires optical elements or structure to be placed at distances on the order of a wavelength or less from what is being observed. So it is limited to some very specific uses.
With that resolution it would be so realistic that my enemy, the Coyote, will think the picture of a train tunnel I print with it is real and smash into it at full speed.
Just to nitpick, lens flare has nothing to do with film vs. digital sensors: it's entirely due to the optics.
What about paper grain?
Just to nitpick, lens flare has nothing to do with film vs. digital sensors: it's entirely due to the optics.
If you re-read my post, I never conflated a direct equivalence between analog film lens flare and digital moire patterns except that both are problematic to decent image quality. I also discussed the issue of using a picture from a print magazine, already converted from RGB > CMYK and screened for 4 or 6 color press, as a suitable image scanned in to test a high resolution printer. Did you really miss that bit?
However, analog film cameras have no provision for overcoming lens aberrations short of spending top dollar on top quality lenses. Modern digit cameras store information about compatible same-brand lens to make digital corrections to lens aberrations while processing the image to memory. I have never seen what could be characterized as moire patterns when converting from analog film to analog prints in a traditional darkroom, but even with top quality name brand digital cameras the included DSP(s) never can completely eliminate the possibility of moire patterns found in digital images.
You need to pick your nits a bit more carefully, lest you be mistaken for something a bit more anally retentive than nits.
...ought to be enough for anybody
hahaha.... jaw crusher... that's funny :)
Even though there is a picture that shows low fidelity, we don't really know if the image was scanned poorly, saved poorly, converted by a reporter poorly, or converted yet again for upload to the web server poorly. I'm willing to give the system the benefit of a doubt, though it's also possible that they haven't come up with enough patterns of gold and silver posts to smoothly represent millions of colors.
Thank you, AC, for the well written explanation of how holograms work. I've never quite understood until now!
To be honest, the main reason I said that, was because I wanted to see if I could post a link to the original article and still be modded up. Apparently you can.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm pretty sure this is already small enough to make an HDTV at a similar body-to-screen-size ratio for ants.
Yes, smaller details resolved - not color. That would still not break the barrier on the smallest color printing possible.
You are incorrect. 100,000 dpi is approximately 4000 dots per millimeter. Divide 1mm by 4000 and you get exactly 250nm. Oh yeah, they also do mention this number in the article which you should read - it's more informative than the summary and the following ignorant comments by people who also haven't read it.
I do my really large stuff on a color laser, too, but then again, I spent two grand on the printer specifically so that I could print draft copies of dust covers for hardcover books. I even do photo printing on my color laser. It claims 9600x600 DPI, which in practice means that as long as you aren't looking at it from such a steep angle that you can see the texture and semigloss reflection of the toner, it produces jaw-droppingly good photographic prints.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Optical images. Scanning electron microscopes (what I assume you meant by "atomic scopes") are not optical.
That puts it out of my price range I spent about $400 on my printer, but then you went and jumped up to a more pro level printer like my father in law did. Does your color laser do roll feed as that was the main benefit of my father-in-law's printer when he got it 7 years ago?
Time to offend someone
I would have thought banning him based on content/style of post would be an easy task
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
The reason you got modded up was you used the word 'wavelength' and lots of new slashdotters got erections
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Does this mean that ultimately there is going to be a resolution on 3D printers in the future also?
Near field techniques are used for spectroscopy too. So color information still can be detected from objects much smaller than a wavelength in specialized setups.
No, no roll feed—I'm not aware of any laser printers that take roll paper, unless perhaps it's those industrial-grade monsters that fill half a room and cost as much as my printer plus another zero or two—but it will do up to 12.25" x 47.24" banner sheets. When I print dust covers, I cut the banner paper down to half length with a paper cutter (somewhere in the neighborhood of 9.25" x 22" post-trim size, IIRC). I also frequently print sheet music folios on 11" x 17" paper with it.
I should clarify: it's a two grand printer, not counting the duplexer unit or the 500-sheet second paper tray. I added the duplexer because I use this thing to print draft copies of my novels for editing purposes (a few hundred pages at a time, in color to make it easier to identify things like blockquotes, in-doc comments to myself, etc.) and because it makes music printing easier.
I added the 500 sheet (ream-sized) tray initially because I like to just shove in a whole ream at the same time instead of having to split it in half, but man, I'm glad I have it now. It makes life so much easier for music printing because I don't have to change out the paper when I do folio printing of music with a half-sized center sheet. I just let it send the 11" x 17" pages to the built-in drawer and the standard-sized pages to the full-ream add-on drawer. Because it can print one and then the other in alternation, there's no need for manually matching up the pieces at the end and accidentally giving half of the clarinets a copy with the middle two pages missing. (Sorry, guys.) So much simpler.
So yeah, with all of my unusual needs, a suitable printer costs a fortune. On the plus side, I expect to pass this thing on to my grandkids someday. Oh, and I think it is without a doubt the one piece of expensive hardware that I will never have to worry about anyone stealing. One of my coworkers helped my set it up. It took both of us to lift the thing, and that was without the additional paper tray and duplexer. In total, with the extra tray and duplexer, it weighs in at a whopping 190 pounds, give or take—19 pounds less if you remove the toner, waste toner tank, and print drums—about 15 pounds more if you fill it with 750 sheets of 11" x 17" paper....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.