Zana design have created this huge hamster wheel like device that they use to print words in the wet sand on the beach. It’s a great idea and a brilliant form of free advertising, that is until either the tide comes in or the beach starts getting busy.
Archive for February, 2010
Hamster wheel printer
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
3D Printer: Continued
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
If you’ve read the previous post on the HP 3D printer then you should have a rough idea of what these things are capable of. Well hyundai have sponsored the royal college of art in London and the results show just how useful 3D printers could be if they ever reached mainstream. Students of the Vehicle Design programme at the Royal art of college used Mcors’ Matrix 300 3D printer to create vehicle concept models.
The Mcor Matrix 300 builds the models in a different way to HPs’ upcoming model and also can print color and texture. It builds the models using A4 sheets of paper, adhesive and a blade that’s built into the printer, and claims to be more eco-friendly than alternative 3D printers aswell as being “inexpensive”. The printer is currently on sale in Ireland and the UK, but as the price indicates (€29,950 including software) it’s still not something everyone will have in their home.
PrePeat: Eco-Friendly Printer
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010Lets face it, the current printer technology we all use on a daily basis is old. Printer ink and toner cartridges have been around for ages, surely something new and more eco-friendly must be on the way. Well printer technology has still been advancing even though the advances don’t seem to be effecting the mainstream for example ink-less and toner-less printers do exist, but are either to expensive or just not available to the public. Most of these “advances” seem to be aimed towards making a more eco-friendly printer, such as the PrePeat printer.
The PrePeat printer doesn’t use ink or toner, instead it uses a special thermal head to print. The thing that makes this printer even more eco-friendly is that it can recycle paper. You can put in a piece of paper that already has something printed on it, and the printer erases it using the thermal head and prints straight back on to the paper.
This all sounds great, looks like we might be out of business selling ink and toner cartridges…
Or maybe not, the printer isn’t really as perfect as it may seem. The main downfall is that the printer only uses a special type of plastic paper, this paper only comes in reams of 1000 sheets and costing around £2.12 a sheet it’s not the cheapest way to save the planet. The printer itself costs over £3500 and although you can use a sheet of the plastic paper up to 1000 times, I still don’t think it’s the answer to our eco-printing problems… yet.
How Many Pages Can My HP Cartridge Print?
Friday, February 5th, 2010Lately HP seem to be questioned a lot about their cartridge prices, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. The reason this has come to mind is because I have been looking at the page yield for a couple of HP cartridges on the official HP site. For those of you who don’t know, page yield is basically the number of pages you can print with a give printer and cartridge.
The cartridge product pages on the HP site do specify the approximate cartridge yield, but they do not specify what the cartridge yield is based on and to find this out on the HP site is almost impossible. HP use the the ISO 24711 testing guidelines, for more information you can go to this page on the HP site: http://h10060.www1.hp.com/pageyield/articles/uk/en/IsoInkjetYield.html (had to bookmark it to be able to find it again). But basically they print out 5 test pages (image on the right) one after the other over and over again until the printer says the cartridge is empty.
Although you would think that the tests are carried out to give the buyer an insight into how many pages they will get out of their cartridge, HP state that the results they get may not be what you will experience for regular every day printing. One of the reasons for this is that when you use your printer at home, you will usually print out one or a couple of pages and then not use the printer again until you next need to, and while your printer is not printing it will still use ink to keep the nozzle clear. Whereas when HP do their tests they will print continuously and because of this get more pages out of the ink cartridge.
To be fair, all this information is on the HP site, the only problem is finding it. I’m sure a regular buyer doesn’t want to trail round the site looking for this information when all they want is to quickly buy an ink cartridge.
What (Not) To Do With Your Empty Ink Cartridges
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010In case you’re wondering just what to do with your empty ink cartridges, we’ve come up with a few fun do’s and don’ts.
Why Are Ink Cartridges So Expensive?
Monday, February 1st, 2010
The topic of ink cartridges being so expensive has been talked about a lot lately, some have even proven that printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids around. Lots of people are raising the subject of the unreasonably high cost of ink cartridges but not talking so much about why the manufacturers (especially HP) are charging so much for it.
There is actually a reason the manufacturers are doing this. If you think about how much an actual printer costs, you will be surprised at how cheap they can be. The printer manufacturers bring out products at low prices so that households have access to them. The problem with this is that to make any money they have to sell the ink cartridges at a stupid price. This has been a common business plan for many other products through out history i.e.: cheap razors but expensive razor blades, cheap or even free phones but expensive contracts, cheap games consoles but the games cost a fortune, etc.
Although this may be true, printer manufacturers charge this much for ink because they just can, because there is a demand for the product and people do pay the ridiculous prices for original ink cartridges.
The one thing that can be done to save money on your ink cartridges is buy remanufactured or compatible ink cartridges. It does so happen that we sell both 
.
Top Four Driver Sites For HP Printer Drivers
Monday, February 1st, 2010Over the year I have discovered, as many of you also will have, that one of the most annoying and sometimes difficult tasks when installing a new computer device is finding the right drivers. This is the case even more so now with the windows 7 compatibility issues, looking for the right drivers for your printer can be a daunting task.
So with this in mind I have compiled a list of the top 4 driver sites that you can download your HP printer drives from:
- The first is obviously the official HP site, they have all of the drivers on here and they are all upd ated often. So this is probably the best place to start looking for your driver.
- Next is the Softpedia site, it’s a great site for any type of driver and their HP printer driver selection is great.
- Printer-drivers.com is a great site dedicated to just that printer drivers. They have a huge database of just under 5000 different HP printer drivers so you will struggle not to find your printer on there, although I’m not sure how much the site is updated.
- This next site is another great one for any type of driver, and for HP printer drivers you can just type in the printer model number to find it. The only downside to this site is that you have to register to download a driver.
With all these sites available, you are bound to be able to find the right driver and if not then google is your next option.
