Color Printing Reaches Its Ultimate Resolution 140
ananyo writes "The highest possible resolution images — about 100,000 dots per inch — have been achieved, and in full-colour, with a printing method that uses tiny pillars a few tens of nanometres tall. The method could be used to print tiny watermarks or secret messages for security purposes, and to make high-density data-storage discs. Each pixel in these ultra-resolution images is made up of four nanoscale posts capped with silver and gold nanodisks. By varying the diameters of the structures (which are tens of nanometres) and the spaces between them, it's possible to control what colour of light they reflect. As a proof of principle, researchers printed a 50×50-micrometre version of the 'Lena' test image, a richly coloured portrait of a woman that is commonly used as a printing standard (abstract). Even under the best microscope, optical images have an ultimate resolution limit, and this method hits it."
And it's cartridges will... (Score:5, Funny)
...cost 10 times the printer itself.
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So, same as regular ink?
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And the jets will be irretrievably plugged 3 uses into ownership.
Thank God Murphy wasn't really a Legislator.
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Well, as a Mensa member for whom English is a fifth language, I'd like to chime in with...
Oh yes we do. Just as often as you mere mortals.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
I can think of one way their claim can be entirely true, and not just another shortsighted statement like Duell's:
If they make it any smaller, they won't be dealing with visible light anymore.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a picture if you want to see it [nature.com]. Although it is small, fidelity to the original image is clearly low. The technique could use some improving. Still cool.
Re:fidelity to the original image is clearly low (Score:2)
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Considering that this whole photo is printed at a size of about a 1/4 of the size of a printed period at 12 pt, we could probably forgive that. It's probably an artifact of magnification - and that this is so close to the limit that the colors start to blur together because it's too close to the size of the wavelength of the colors that are printed.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell [wikipedia.org]
Famous statement attributed in various forms to various people throughout history. Duell's actual statement (provided that was attributed correctly) was the exact opposite of this.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
What a simpleton! He was clearly proven wrong when we invented the Rectangle with Rounded Corners.
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
And those thousand dollar bills can be printed on recycled Euros,
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We see this in the length of antennas. To receive a signal, the antenna has to be at
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Are you thinking about the invisible man.
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Basically once you get below the oder of the wavelength, one cannot discern the details
Or slashdotters.
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We see this in the length of antennas. To receive a signal, the antenna has to be at least a quarter wavelength. If you look at old cars that are made to receive conventional AM signals, they are longer.
Untrue. "conventional AM signals", at least in the US, are from 540kHz to 1610kHz. Wavelengths corresponding to those frequencies are 555.5m to 186m, respectively. Taking the shorter of the two, a quarter wavelength of 186m is 46.5m. I've never seen an antenna on a car that's 10x the length of the car! Any a
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That being said, the image might be no better than 50x50 pixels, even if there's many times more coated posts in the image than this. Might explain why it's so blurry.
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I just read
"Everything that can be inverted has been inverted"
(need more coffee)
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When we reach physical limits, we can say this is the best we are going to make it. But it isn't saying we cant find a cheaper, faster, lighter, smaller, more efficient invention. We just can't do better, but we can match it.
Also a lot of inventions have reached good enough and don't need major fixes.
Lets take leather. It is still a popular product.
It is very tough, it is flexible, it is light, and durable, insulates heat well. We had leather for thousands of years, we have improved on the process of mak
optical images have an ultimate resolution limit (Score:1)
You can read higher resolutions with atomic scopes etc, and you can create images other than with lenses, so I don't think we've hit the limit yet, unless there's something in TFA about sticking dots on quarks or something...
Re: optical images have an ultimate resolution lim (Score:4, Informative)
Re: optical images have an ultimate resolution lim (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm pretty sure this is already small enough to make an HDTV at a similar body-to-screen-size ratio for ants.
Re: optical images have an ultimate resolution lim (Score:5, Funny)
Pigmint, huh. Isn't that the pork rind they leave on your pillow at night at a Motel 6 in the south? :)
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I LOL'd.
Re: optical images have an ultimate resolution lim (Score:4, Informative)
Even under the best microscope, optical images have an ultimate resolution limit [wikipedia.org], and this method hits it.
And the linked Wikipedia article quoth:
With green light around 500nm the Abbe limit is 250nm.
That's a bit more than 100,000 dpi. Visible light goes down to 380 nm (~133,000 dpi), so you'll never see anything smaller by optical means.
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Yes, smaller details resolved - not color. That would still not break the barrier on the smallest color printing possible.
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Too Much Reality (Score:3, Funny)
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I would agree with you if it were not for the apparent popularity of Japanese Tentacle Porn and a sundry list of Goatse available on the Internet.
We all joke about a wading through a throng of midgets with thousand island dressing, but perhaps there is more truth to that than we would like to admit.
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I first parsed this as wading through a thong of midgets with thousand island dressing and wondered WTF. Then I re-read it and still went WTF.
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Kind of my point.
For everybody saying, "WTF", there is somebody else saying, "Ohhhh Myyyy".
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Lol. But you got better right?
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Still not close enough! (Score:5, Funny)
> 'Lena' test image [cmu.edu]
Pr0n, driving tech development since cavemen fingerpainted a wall.
Re:Still not close enough! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Still not close enough! (Score:4, Insightful)
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No...
They use it because it has many edges, colors and textures, which makes it interesting from a pure CS point of view - that's also why they only use the face...
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They use it because it has many... colors
Err, yeah, except for the one that the human eye is most sensitive to, green. The image has a reddish tint like a faded magazine print (unsurprisingly) so that single shade of blue is also very muted. I can't say I see a lot of texture, either. Five seconds of Googling turns up http://bit.ly/Pd75s1 [bit.ly] (yes, it's perfectly safe for work) which looks like a far more useful image.
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Erm... What?
CS as in computer science, last I checked the computers ability to process information was not depending on the operators ability to see color.
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last I checked the computers ability to process information was not depending on the operators ability to see color.
There's an entire class of shades missing from the image (no "greens" in the sense that no pixels have their maximum value in the green channel), and another (blue) is a single almost-grey shade. That makes it, to me, a poor general-case test image. It might be fine if you're writing facial recognition software, but it would be next to useless if you were trying to implement a clone of Photoshop's selective colour filter.
Re:Still not close enough! (Score:5, Interesting)
See the discussion on whether or not sexual harassment is ingrained in hacker culture...
Really? How is this indicative of sexual harassment? "Ohmygod! It's part of a picture taken from Playboy!" Never mind that the test image is just a picture of her face. Or the fact that women who pose for playboy and similar magazines do so by choice and get paid to do so.
Comments like yours are why so many people immediately backlash whenever sexual harassment is discussed. The article you are referring to talks about women being groped at the crotch in the middle of a conference. That's a legitimate concern. It's freaking assault. However, when I see the words "sexual harassment", I do have to go and read the details before I can determine whether it's something legitimate or someone who decided that, for example, using Lenna as a test picture is indicative of a sexism problem in hacker culture. I bet lots of the comments in the discussion you are referring to are from people who didn't read the article, and assume it's really about the bullshit type of sexual harassment.
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Lena herself actually enjoyed this use of her image for print testing. Doesn't sexual harassment require a victim?
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But your statement is completely misunderstanding who is the victim of harassment in this example.
No, it wasn't. Read the thread.
We were talking about the sexual harassment inherent in a Playboy picture. We weren't talking about coworkers putting naughty pictures up at the company meeting.
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Having naked pictures in most places of work becomes sexual harassment if women who work there are exposed to them and don't want to be. The only exceptions that I can think of are actually magazines and other intentional publishers of such content, and medical offices, and the latter only if properly in context.
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At that time in magazine advertising there were thousands of brightly-colored photos of women's faces and interesting backgrounds that could have been used, and they could have even *gasp* bought a photo from a local photography studio... Any of these could have been just as popular, without the legally-questionable sourcing.
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Well, heteronormativity seems to be. ;)
(No, I don't know the gender orientation or preferences of the individuals who selected this image. I'm just pointing out the assumption being made.)
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It also ensures that image compression methods are optimized for the kind of images that make up the majority of image data on the internet.
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I've been seeing this image in image processing texts for decades, and never had a clue where it came from. I am not disappointed.
Can you print holograms with it? (Score:2)
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They would also need to make a layer of it thick enough to do so. Holograms work because they're in a 3D medium (even though only paper-thin), whereas this method is strictly 2D at this point.
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That's not how holograms work. Holograms are made with ordinary photographic film just like you used to use in an ordinary camera. What makes holograms work is that a diffraction pattern is stored on the film rather than the image itself; to look at a hologram without a laser is to look at squiggles.
To make a hologram, you put the subject in a dark room, take a laser and split its beam, with the film between the beams and the subject. After you develop the film, shine a lensed laser at it and the true 3D im
+1 Informative (Score:2)
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Is that you, Clawring Crabe?
Call me at the next breakthough... (Score:3)
Until then, I'll stick with lasers. Even if it's just b/w.
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...as in an inkjet printer that doesn't clog up from dried up ink, so it it has a lifetime of over a year.
Sadly, there's no financial reason to offer such a printer.
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now that would be a breakthrough
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HP880c - bought in 1999, was left in its box with partially used cartridges in place for 18 months at one point; often unused for weeks or months; always works fine when needed. Using cheap non-HP cartridges as well (GBP2 for black cartridge). Print quality still very good.
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That was before the nozzles shrunk again. Newer printers have smaller nozzles than ever. Every printer is a "photo" printer.
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Get out of the consumer market, when you get to large format commercial printers, they have their own head cleaning/ink cycling routine, and you can have them be completely autonomous about it.
Questions from the artist: (Score:1)
Enables anti-coyote measures IRL (Score:1)
Paper Grain? (Score:1)
What about paper grain?
640k... (Score:1)
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I don't get it anyway. Is that some spam that is trying to sell anything?
Even if I were interested, I wouldn't know what or how to buy. It reads like Time Cube to me.
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It reads like Time Cube to me.
Yes, but it is missing that all important ingredient.. the background wallpaper that makes your brain hurt.
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You mean like Big'uns?
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Re:Added home utility (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't care about size, I recommend networked color laser printers. No more clogged printheads, no more quirky drivers that break every other release (they speak PostScript), usually at least 5 PPM in color even for the small ones, and the bigger ones will do as much as 25 PPM in full color. Of course, they don't cost $50, but you also don't pay $50 in ink every time you need to refill the thing. (Okay, so you pay a couple hundred bucks in toner, but for home use, you refill the thing every five years instead of every month or two, so it works out to being a lot cheaper.) And instead of replacing the whole thing every couple of years when the print head finally gives up the ghost, you'll still be using the same color laser printer in a couple of decades.
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I do my really large stuff on a color laser, too, but then again, I spent two grand on the printer specifically so that I could print draft copies of dust covers for hardcover books. I even do photo printing on my color laser. It claims 9600x600 DPI, which in practice means that as long as you aren't looking at it from such a steep angle that you can see the texture and semigloss reflection of the toner, it produces jaw-droppingly good photographic prints.
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No, no roll feed—I'm not aware of any laser printers that take roll paper, unless perhaps it's those industrial-grade monsters that fill half a room and cost as much as my printer plus another zero or two—but it will do up to 12.25" x 47.24" banner sheets. When I print dust covers, I cut the banner paper down to half length with a paper cutter (somewhere in the neighborhood of 9.25" x 22" post-trim size, IIRC). I also frequently print sheet music folios on 11" x 17" paper with it.
I should cla
Re:Added home utility (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for years in the DTP and pre-press market back in the 1980's and 1990's. The best hardcopy printers (not pre-press) that we had available at the time were Tektronix dye-sublimation and Firey 2000 inkjet printers. Mere 300 LPI flatbed scanners with a gamma of 4.0 were supplanted by 400 LPI analog drum scanners with a gamma of 4.8+. Color matching became critical to the conversion from RGB to CMYK for pre-press. Quality printing began with 600 LPI 4 color mask process and advanced from there in LPI and color layers. Special monitors and calibration equipment were used to age-adjust old-fashioned phosphor monitors. Reliance upon SGI computers and then Apple computers spelled the death-knell for special purpose graphics systems such as Genigraphics, and then eventually with SGI. And PostScript, WTF is that?
Today, even pre-press is a dying industry, along with most print magazines. The only segment of the industry that appears to still be thriving is the soft porn men's magazines, from which the OP's test image originated. But I can assure the /. readers that a photo from a magazine is hardly an adequate test source for scanned images let alone high resolution print, since the image has already been massaged through the RGB > CMYK process and then the screening process (color separated dots, not pixels). OTOH, original analog photographs taken under controlled studio conditions, then printed in a computer-controlled darkroom is/was the standard. This printer may, or may not, be as good as advertised but the testing paradigm is highly dubious. Swapping analog film lens flare for digital moire patterns is not, IMHO, an advancement in print technology. And Kodak, WTF is that? No wonder that quality print industry has departed the USA, now done in Germany and to a lesser degree Japan.
Kids these days just don't know diddley squat ... now, get the heck off my lawn !!
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Personally I liked the 3M Rainbow DyeSub printers, they used the same colour encoding as their Matchpoint chem proofing systems.
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The DTP / pre-press shop I worked in also sold the equipment we used. I remember seeing the 3M DyeSub printers at trade shows but never had any hands-on experience with them. IIRC, they were an option on some of the Genigraphics systems. The specs were quite good as I recall, and looked a bit like the Kodak DyeSub printer.
We also used Matrix Digital Film Recorders (8K 8x10 back) and Linotronic Typesetting Printers, did video out to VTRs and CDROM, graphics design, web page development, plus had our own prof
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Just to nitpick, lens flare has nothing to do with film vs. digital sensors: it's entirely due to the optics.
If you re-read my post, I never conflated a direct equivalence between analog film lens flare and digital moire patterns except that both are problematic to decent image quality. I also discussed the issue of using a picture from a print magazine, already converted from RGB > CMYK and screened for 4 or 6 color press, as a suitable image scanned in to test a high resolution printer. Did you really miss that bit?
However, analog film cameras have no provision for overcoming lens aberrations short of spendin
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'Retina' resolution depends on 1) device size and 2) typical viewing distance.
For a 3.5 inch or so screen viewed at arm's length and for average human eyes, it's pretty much is as close together as one can discriminate.
YMMV.
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Unless you're holding your iPad at about 3" from your eye, Apple's definition is accurate and much better than anyone else's displays.
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Okay, now I'm not buying a New iPad - I'm holding out for the 100,000 dpi version.
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Apple's "Retina" display might be better than anyone else's displays at the moment, but healthy human eyes have a angular resolution of roughly 0.5 arc minutes. At 12 inches away, which is not an unreasonable reading distance, this is a spacing of roughly 44 microns.
Taking the nyquist limit into consideration, that means that when viewed from 12 inches away, it is still possible to distingui
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For printing, divide by four. When they say 300 dpi, I'm pretty sure that's 300 dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black combined (or an effective 75dpi of complete pixels). 200+dpi on Apple's retina screen doesn't count subpixels.
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That doesn't even take into account the amount of damage the dust from cheap paper does to the insides of quality print hardware. Ranging from clogging up optical sensors through to scratching drums with really crap paper.
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