After seeing this video, I can safely confirm that you can probably make anything with Lego. Well maybe not anything, but at least we know that it’s possible to build a printer from Lego.
This amazing project took a member member of the B3ta forums about three weeks to complete, and he’s basically used Lego and a felt tip to create a fully functioning (monochrome) printer. Take a look:
This is probably one of the funnest printers I’ve ever seen, just genius.
Did your camera just run out of batteries again? Or maybe you lost the USB lead to transfer your photographs onto your PC? Well maybe it’s time for you to use some older technology.
This fun DIY project made by Dippold will have you gluing and snipping away till you end up with your own simple but very affective pinhole camera.
You can print off the template for the camera here, if you do get round to making it, please do send us the results.
Ink cartridges seem to be just another one of those everyday products that in some cases people dred buying, mainly because of the cost. But what alot of people don’t realise, including myself until I got into the printer business, is that printers aren’t just used for printing some work document anymore. As you’ll be able to see in some of the previous blog posts, printers are evolving into devices that you can carry around in your pocket, into 3D printers capable of printing whatever you please, bio-printers that use cells to build new organs, and much more.
But what about the ink itself? OK it’s true that most of the devices above don’t use ink, but when looking at the everyday printer, the ink it uses has pretty much stayed the same. Maybe it’s time to invent something new and exiting and of course more Eco-friendly. Well there are actually many types of ink out there apart from your everyday HP ink.
For example, have you ever heard of edible printer ink? No? Well there are many sites on the web selling just that. Ink cartridges for your printer filled with edible ink. They are used for printing onto icing sheets for cakes, etc. Just pop a edible ink cartridge into your printer and a sheet of icing paper into the paper tray and print away.
Another interesting example is actually glow in the dark printer ink. I havn’t been able to find any pre-filled glow in the dark cartridges, but below is a video showing how to make one yourself. Imagine the wonders you could print using glow in the dark ink!
Here we have another concept eco-printer, the REENK by Hyo Sun Ahn & Min Koung So. Similar to the Pencil lead printer, the REENK uses the leftover ink from ballpoint pens after they stop working. The only flaws I can see with this design is that you would probably have to buy specific CMYK pens that would probably be more expensive than your avarage ballpoint pen, and when have you ever used a yellow pen? The concept is still a great one though.
I bet that at some point in your life you’ve wondered what would happen if you put an ink cartridge in a microwave. Actually the though probabily has never crossed your mind, but I’m going to show you a video of someone microwaving a cartridge anyway. (Don’t try this at home)
It’s roughly how I imagined what it would look like, a burning plastic mess in a microwave.
There are alot of eco-printer concepts about lately and the Pencil Printer is one of the most innotive ones I’ve seen so far.
The Pencil Printer by Hoyoung Lee may only be a concept but it’s a great idea. It grounds down pencil stubs to create a fine lead powder similar to the powder used in toner cartridges. Aswell as printing it can also erase in the proccess if you have made any mistakes within the documen. It’s a great concept for anyone who wants to print of documents that would need to be edited alot but is also eco-friendly.
If only the big companies would sponser some of these eco-friendly concepts.
Lets 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.
Lately 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.
In 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.
