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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.
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.
It should be possible to print colour holograms if they get the resolution high enough.
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.
You mean like Big'uns?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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 !!
...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.
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
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.