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Researchers Devise New Printing Technique To Produce High-Resolution Color Images Without Using Ink (gizmodo.com)
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.
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.
how far away are we from cheap commercial versions?
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?
Did you see the unbelievably life-like color in those samples? The shot of the Taj Mahal is especially stunning.
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!
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...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
127,000 dpi, what's with the archaic units? Roughly 200 nm/dot?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Still sounds expensive with all these layers you need to do the job.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
a bargain at only $200 a page!
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
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.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
*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?
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
Work Safe Porn
This printer prints on coal, using coal as an ink, and the printer itself is made is out of BBQ briquettes. If you ask 'how black is it?' then the answer is None. None more black!
You can have any color you want as long as you want black.
The device is a tone-on-tone hipster's dream.
Steve Jobs' turtleneck sweater wishes it could be this cool and this black.
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 of polyester and acetate and there is no practical recycling of them, so they go into a landfill.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
this invention clearly promises a great path to even more expensive printing.
If I were those researchers, I would have spoken of potential use cases not quite competing with ordinary laser printers.
Cool, I can design stuff on my iridescent lcd and then print it exactly.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427705/iridescent-displays/
Can this effect be achieved by manipulating only heights of pillars arranged in an regular 2D matrix?
If so, than it is in principle possible to create an analogue to this technology for novel type of colour displays, possibly an colour "electronic ink" type of displays.
And another thing, since this is basically manipulation with interference of light, can this tech produce holographic pictures as well?
Since the 'paper' samples seem to be like a mm in size they have to.... 300 DPI ain't gonna work good on a 1/10th of inch piece of paper....
Despite the hype in the article, it appears embedding this paper in something else as a security feature is really only use so far.
It appears to be holographic depending on angle. Doubt it is very flexible.
Wonder how much that piece of (smaller than!) shredded 'paper' costs?
and umm...the color (all 4 of em) sucks. superduperHD CGA now with bright bits!