Canon's Fuel Cell May Drive Portable Gear

RX8 writes "Canon, Inc., has taken the wraps off prototype rechargeable hydrogen fuel cells, the likes of which may one day power digital cameras, media players, and printers. Canon's demonstrated fuel cells win even more points on the environmental front: while companies such as Toshiba, Sanyo, and NEC have also been working on fuel cells (and had been expected to have developed fuel cell-driven notebook computers by now), those efforts are based on DMFC technology which derives hydrogen from methanol, producing small amounts of carbon dioxide (itself a greenhouse gas) in the process. Canon's cells obtain hydrogen from a refillable cartridge with no toxic byproducts."

Mods are on crack.

[sr180]

I love how the moderators around here are on crack. +4 Interesting? Dihydrogen monoxide is WATER.

He has made a joke, not written an informative statement...

aHA! TFA is a blank page.

[SeaFox]

Another press release about a breakthrough that (assuming we actually get it working reliably and cheaply) may possibly dubut in a high end product nobody would buy for sticker-shock reasons in Japan in three years.

Really, wake me up when it's actually in a shipping product. I'll be excited then. Until it's working in the real world, it's just vaporware.

broken link

[benjamindees]

Try these instead:

Canon develops fuel cell prototypes [engadget.com]

Canon shows prototype hydrogen fuel cell [infoworld.com]

Canon to develop fuel cells for printers, cameras [boston.com]

Re:Mods are on crack - but the parent is right

[RAMMS+EIN]

``I love how the moderators around here are on crack. +4 Interesting? Dihydrogen monoxide is WATER.

He has made a joke, not written an informative statement...''

Regardless of how he meant it, water does have a much stronger greenhouse effect than CO2. See the entry in the WikiPedia article [wikipedia.org].

Re:Mystery Cartridge!

[m4dm4n]

And since the article linked too is gone, try this http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-5912639.html [zdnet.com]

Re:A letter from the hydrogen-powered future

[broggyr]

Most chargers I use get warm to some degree, so that must mean that some energy is doing nothing but heating the charger.

Re:so where

[FridayBob]

"Theoretically, they could get it from nuclear power or from wind power, which is beginning to mature. ..."

And the faster the price of oil goes up, the sooner those alternative energy sources will mature. Seriously, they've been plenty mature for quite a while now, even though the technology is always being improved. However, on price alone (and not counting the cost of the environmental consequences), they're always going to be more expensive than cheap oil. That's always been the problem with alternative energy sources in our market-driven economy...

(Unless, of course, somebody can come up with something really radical, like a cheap, 99% efficient solar cell based on a very high-temperature superconductor or something. Hell, even 50% would be great!).

Re:Now, let me guess about fuel cell cartidges

[Dogtanian]

Seeing as Canon are involved, they'll probably contain 5ml of Hydrogen, cost half the price of the camera and be chipped to prevent unauthorized refilling.

Arf... actually, I was going to get the same joke in myself, but about the tiny tankfuls, not the chipping. The reason I use a (low-end) Canon printer is that (unlike their rivals) they *don't* play silly buggers with chips, refills and so on; you can get third-party ink tanks with no hassle.

I've never had to consider a refill kit, as I can get new tanks for a (relatively) decent price. Most hassle I had was a clogged head that a cleaning cartridge didn't fix (I ended up soaking the base of the print-head in meths, and it was as good as new). And *that* was probably because I'd used crappy third-party ink.

If you want to lay into crappy printer manufacturers, go for Lexmark or something...

Hydrogen Vs the Dinosaurs...again

[CubicleView]

All these articles, about hydrogen fuel cells always lead to the same argument being posted. Ie: Hydrogen isn't a better fuel source than oil because it requires electricity to produce. To get electricity you have to burn more oil, and due to losses in the circuit you'd be better off just burning the oil in the first place. This argument is flawed (at least IMOA). Don't look at hydrogen or oil as competing fuel sources, consider them to be simply different mediums for transfer energy. With oil the circuit is Sun -> Plants->Dinosaurs->Oil, Coal, whatever. An awful lot of energy is lost in that circuit. The Oil itself requires energy to extract and refine for a start, and plants and animals are not very efficient. Anyway bottom line is, oil just represents loads of stored solar energy, which we're using faster than we're replacing. With hydrogen you can store energy from multiple sources, solar wind, nuclear, etc. As long as those sources don't release pollutants etc it's a much cleaner and faster energy transfer medium. It's not as energy dense, but it's easily more energy efficient and cost effective than growing a butt load of plants and dinosaurs and waiting for thousands of years while they turn into Oil.

Re:Mods are on crack - but the parent is right

[Red Flayer]

"Regardless of how he meant it, water does have a much stronger greenhouse effect than CO2."

In a lab, not in the troposphere. Net effect of H2O is very low. Read a little further down in the Wikipedia entry: "Water vapor in the troposphere, unlike the better-known greenhouse gases such as CO2, is essentially passive in terms of climate: the residence time for water vapor in the atmosphere is short (about a week) so perturbations to water vapor rapidly re-equilibriate. In contrast, the lifetimes of CO2, methane, etc, are long (hundreds of years) and hence perturbations remain. Thus, in response to a temperature perturbation caused by enhanced CO2, water vapor would increase, resulting in a (limited) positive feedback and higher temperatures. In response to a perturbation from enhanced water vapor, the atmosphere would re-equilibriate due to clouds causing reflective cooling and water-removing rain."