IBM have carved a 3D map of the earth using a new nanometer-scale silicon milling machine they have developed. I suppose it’s not really printing as what this device is doing is actually carving away particles but still its extremely interesting.
The map that measures 22×11 micrometers and that took 2 mintutes and 23 seconds to make, would fit 1000 times on a single grain of salt. The nanomill used to make it uses heat and pressure to carve with extreme acurracy.
They also created a scale 3D model of the Matterhorn mountain, heres a video for more information:
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!
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.
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.
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 .
Over 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.
HP have anounced and have released preview videos of their new HP Tablet PC device or HP Slate. The PC like device has been developed by HP with the help of microsoft and is due to be released mid 2010.
There isn’t much information on the specifications of the device at the moment but there are a couple of videos on youtube about the development of the HP Slate. What we do know is that the Slate will run windows 7, has a x86 processor, WIFI capabilities, a multitouch display, webcam, USB ports, and will be able to run all aplications compatible with the Windows OS including the kindle app giving you access to over 400,000 books.
Rumors of the device have been around for ages as HP originally concieved the idea around 5 years ago, but only as a e-reader type device. The slate was not anounced officially until earlier this month, just a couple of weeks before the launch of their future competitor the Apple iPad.
The price of the HP Slate is yet to be announced, but it is rumoured to cost under $800 (£500), which sounds about right as Apples’ product will cost from $499 (aprox. £300) upwards.
We have now added a new space for Technical blogs. We are taking a closer look at some of the HP inkjet cartridges, how they are built, how much ink they actually have in and how the remanufactured products compare to the original products on ink volume and print quality. Over the coming months we will be looking at differant products, we have started with the HP 350 (CB335EE), please take a look, you can find it in in the categories at the right of the page……..
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