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.
Here’s a bit of an odd one, but cool none the less. The Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory, sort of a 3D printer that prints food.
Made by Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran the cornucopia uses an array of food canisters that individually store and refigirate the ‘cooks’ chosen ingredients. Then these ingredients are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate combinations of food. The food is then heated or cooled by Cornucopia’s chamber or the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head. This fabrication process not only allows for the creation of flavors and textures that would be completely unimaginable through other cooking techniques, but it also allows the user to have ultimate control over the origin, quality, nutritional value and taste of every meal.
Its seems like something from star-trek, but it would be great if they start making these things for real.
This concept by Jon Cumberpatch is not really a printer as such, well it is in a way a printer but it’s not, Let me explain. The ScribbleBot is a wireless printing device that follows a preset drawing path downloaded from the internet, the idea is that the printer does the drawing but you have your hand on it so that you learn how to draw. I suppose it could work if you did the same drawing over and over again. But is it that useful really, I’ll let you decide that for yourself.
ScribbleBots from Jon Cumberpatch on Vimeo.
After yesterdays post about the PrintStik by Planon, I found this concept (above) created by Jihun Kang, Youngho Lee, Jieun Lee & Changsu Lee. The Stick POP seems to be very similar to the PrintStik but looks amazing. It doesn’t have capacity to hold paper, but instead you just feed the paper in one side and it comes out the other and similar to the PrintStik you can print via USB.
Its quite small measuring 23 x 6 centimeters and it has a nice OLED screen that lets you know everything you need to know when printing.
Unfortunatly it is still a concept.
Here’s another cool printer, this time it’s made by Planon and it’s not just a concept.
Planon, who also brought us other cool devices like the Docupen (a fully portable scanner in the shape of a pen), have released the PrintStik. The PrintStik is the worlds smallest portable Bluetooth printer, allowing you to print documents either via USB or Bluetooth. The paper is self-contained within the device meaning that you wouldn’t have to carry a wad of paper around with you.
It is roughly 1”x2”x11”, it can store 20 pieces of paper at a time and it uses thermal technology so doesn’t use ink or toner. The device doesn’t need to be plugged in but instead has a rechargeable battery pack. So this thing is about as portable as it can get unless you could make some weird foldy up printer. Prices start at $199.99 (£130) for the non-Bluetooth version, up to $349.99 (£230) for the top of the range version.
Here’s another eco-friendly printer, and like the pencil printer it doesn’t use a conventional ink. Instead it uses used ground coffee to print its documents, you just pour used coffee grounds into the printers’ cartridge and then move the cartridge from side to side till your document has printed. So basically your doing quite a lot of the printing work for it, but this whole concept has no need for a power source or ink cartridges, so it really is eco-friendly.
Do you get up on a morning and have a boring slice of toast? Well if you do then this thing could make your day a that little bit different everyday.
It functions similarly to the old dot matrix printers, and the Zuse toast printer can burn any 12 by 12 pixel image onto your daily slice of toast and can also randomly choose an image for you from its built in memory chip. But sadly it’s still a concept/prototype, so I don’t think we will be seeing anything in the shops like this just yet.
