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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.
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.
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.