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Smallest Color Picture Ever Printed Fits Inside a Human Hair (www.ethz.ch)
Zothecula sends news about the tiniest color picture ever printed. Gizmag reports: "Scientists have created a picture that only fleas could truly appreciate. That's because the inkjet-printed image takes up an area no larger than the cross-section of a human hair. The picture of a few clownfish in their sea anemone home measures just 80 micrometers x 115 micrometers for a total area of 0.0092 square mm. Researchers from ETH Zurich University and the startup Scrona have been named the new holders of the Guinness World Record for the world's smallest inkjet color image, which they created using '3D Nanodrip' printing technology created at ETH Zurich."
Kelly and the baby... they'll have something to look at now!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The picture of a few clownfish in their sea anemone home measures just 80 m x 115 m
Err...
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Why print a picture of a clown fish? I'd have though an image of crabs would be more logical if it's being placed inside a hair.
Sadly, the printer ran low on magenta after ten printings and I had to drive down to Staples and pick up a new cartridge. $69.95 seemed a bit steep.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
and Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode...
Please fix those Greek SI prefixes.
The size is not given in meters, but micrometers. As in "um", where "u" is a unicode character that News For Nerds[tm] is still trying to implement, on this side of the 21st century...
This is so strange. A picture that only tiny organisms can enjoy, or not.
One small step for those who like to get small....
Have you see the price of printer ink? Nobody can afford
the luxury of ptinting colour on 8.5x11 anymore. The only
viable solution is to reduce the physical print area.
This is the future, people!
CAP === 'surely'
If they figure out how to shrink people, there has to be porn available.
For some time now the medical community has been using inkjet technology, with the ink loaded with live cells, to "seed" 3D printed organ scaffolds with live cells, which then populate, then replace, the scaffold, yielding a live replacement part suitable for implantation. But that depends on the cells' ability to do the fine details of self-organization to handle the small geometry.
It looks like this printer technology could put the cells right where they belong, or pretty much so, enabling the construction of a replacement organ or component in fine detail. Like for kidneys.
Maybe even lay down guides for growing neural interconnections, to get the wiring diagram right. That's getting precariously close to being able to reanimate cryonics patients by (probably destructively) scanning the details of the neural interconnections and other stored state of the nervous system, then building a working brain (with freezing damage and the like repaired) with an accurate and functional instance of the original mind in it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Great now Robotech Overloards will think we're actually the size of a flea and grew Supersized Clones on MacDonalds food to steal Robotech.
I have definitely printed things smaller than 80 metres as im sure everyone else has as well.
Americans, why don't u learn metric? its not hard.
Scientists invent a way to troll their fellow scientists with a new uber-high-resolution inkjet printing technique capable of printing "The Game" small enough to be seen only under a microscope
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
...she didn't say I had to include the scale.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
GTFO!
No engineers involved at all in making that happen?
...and still it used sixty dollars worth of ink cartridges.
of cootietainment, cootvertising, and cootolingiustic programming.
Studies have shown that people with happy cooties are 30% happier than people without cooties, and 70% happier than people with unhappy cooties.
Now we can entertain your cooties or sell them nanoproducts -- or march them away like the Pied Piper, if for some reason you would prefer to be cootie-free than to have the easy and affordable happiness bonus.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Kodachrome could have done that.
With interpixel distance = wavelength of visible light, is this the smallest possible scale for a visible color image? There are tricks to see slightly smaller pixels with a light microscope, but I guess not much smaller.
So if this printer could print that, and could also do a full 8 1/2 x 11, how many total pixels are we talking about? How many dpi? How long until this printer is available at home, and ... when will this technology be applied to additive construction or 3D printing, and also... electronics printing, (as in, printed circuits, literally, on flexible substrate,) or OLED or E-Ink technology?
I ask because, I don't know about any of you, but I am not much of one for pictures I can't see. Kind of defeats the purpose. Surely they'll put this to work doing something useful, like... any of the above, or anything else I didn't think of.
Sneaky bastard, that Nemo.
The image posted in the article seems to be the output of some kind of scanning microscope (note the vertical scan lines). Perhaps a 3-channel confocal "optical" microscope, which scans the image separately with red, green and blue laser beams, then combines them into a final image (like a "color" TV image). So it's really a false-color rendering of 3 mono-chrome images (but "true" color in the sense that each beam captures the actual color response of the inks in the printed image (like a TV etc).
The article doesn't mention the resolution of the actual image but, eyeball counting the scanlines, it looks like somewhere around 160x80 or maybe 200x100. With 25,000 dots per inch, that's about 984 nanometers per dot, slightly larger than the wavelengths of visible light (380-870 nm).
The limit of optical resolution is about a half-wavelength, so there seems to be enough headroom left for improving this result.
requiring a special microscope to be viewed.
WTF is a "special microscope"? What a shit article.
soylentnews.org
The fact that the microscope has a picture of clownfish stuck to its lens is purely coincidental.