Printers
Zero ink, Zero Boundaries: Zink challenges designers
Zink, the company that prints digital photos without ink -- zero ink, geddit? -- has launched a competition for designers, students and the bored to imagine what the future holds for instant printing.
Zink products work by baking specially treated paper, creating the print-out from crystals impregnating the paper. The result is a printed photo, dry-to-touch in under two minutes. Zink first appeared a couple of years ago, and after a no-brainer tie-up with Polaroid is now the technology behind the Polaroid Two digital instant printer. The company is looking for creative types like you -- yes you, you with the arms -- to come up with an instant printing system that will "re-imagine printing and its role in the digital world using the Zink technology to fuel the future possibilities of this unique technology platform." And make Zink lots of money, obv. Continue reading...
Canon Selphy CP780: Print the great outdoors
Canon must know something we don't -- it clearly thinks spring is crouching and poised. It just released a new Selphy dye-sublimation printer, the CP780, which is designed to connect directly to a digital camera to instantly print anywhere outside the house -- a picnic, Easter-egg hunt, mountaineering expedition, meth-fuelled road trip -- whatever the joys of spring inspire. Continue reading...
Riti Printer: Uses tea or coffee for ink
We've seen plenty of printers in our time, but this one is most definitely to our taste. Korean designer Jeon Hwan Ju, probably a beans person, has created the Riti Printer, which uses coffee or tea dregs in place of ink. It's probably good only for sepia printouts, but it's the kind of green tech we like very much.
Coffee or tea dregs are placed into the cartridge, mixed with a little water. You then move the cartridge left and right in the slot to print. It's not the most efficient printer for your home business, but, whether it's Lipton or Lavazza, it produces aromatic printouts you can personalise.Continue reading...
Polaroid PoGo Instant Digital Camera: Give it some stick 
'Sharing' is an overused buzzword in the technology industry these days, but we have to admit there's a definite pleasure to be had from printing and handing round your photos. Polaroid may have ceased making film for its traditional instant camera, but isn't taking the advent of the digital age lying down: the Polaroid PoGo Instant Digital Camera takes a bow at CES 2009.
Sure, Tomy did get there first with the Xiao, but Tomy make toys and Polaroid make cameras. We got a sneak preview of the PoGo printer at last year's CES, where we were shown the ever-so-clever Zink technology. This replaces conventional ink with dye crystal-impregnated paper, bakes the image on to a print-out, and is dry to the touch within a minute. The original PoGo printer attached to camera or computer via USB, but now Polaroid has cut out the middleman with the PoGo camera. Continue reading...
Polaroid PoGo: Instant photo prints on the bounce
Hey kids: stop watching Hollyoaks for a second and come and look at this! Yes, we know Max has died, but this is way more interesting. It's the Polaroid PoGo Instant Mobile Printer! What is it? It's only a portable photo printer that doesn't use any bloomin' ink!
If that sounds familiar, it's because the PoGo was one of the coolest gadgets at CES 2008, despite then labouring under the name Polaroid Digital Instant Mobile Photo Printer. Fortunately the maketing wonks have been earning their Jaffa Cakes by coming up with the PoGo moniker. Continue reading...
Vapourware: The tech that never was
Vapourware may sound like a technical term to describe the gradual corrosion of a kettle, but today we're using it to describe a product announced by a company with great fanfare, hoohah and occasionally hullaballoo -- but that never materialises.
Continual delays, setbacks and excuses are the calling cards of a product that becomes vapourware. Windows Vista ran the risk of joining the club, and the terrific multiplayer first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 was in production for almost a decade before it was released in 2007. Devoted TF fans feared it would become a distinguished entrant in the who's who of vapourware. You might say Google Mail is in the running, having been in beta since 2004. Continue reading...
Polaroid Digital Instant Mobile Photo Printer: Ta-dah!
In 2007, we Craved the Zink printing system, which plugs into your camera and prints with zero ink involved. Instead, crystals are baked onto special paper and ta-dah! Instant prints. We remarked that this could be the Polaroid of the 21st century. Turns out Polaroid must have been paying attention, because it has licensed the technology and ta-dah! The Polaroid Digital Instant Mobile Photo Printer. Continue reading...
Brother DCP-135C: Quirky, cheap multi-function printer
We're pretty wild and crazy here at Crave. When we're not partying with rock stars, we're getting down and dirty with multi-function inkjet printers like the Brother DCP-135C. That's how we roll.
We're not sure which we prefer, but the DCP-135C is pretty cool. It'll do photo prints, scanning and colour copying. It's not slow, either -- in inkjet terms. It'll spew colour documents at 20 pages per minute or monochrome docs at 25ppm. And the best part is the price: the RRP is £60, but if you shop around you can pick one up for about £40.
Now the bad news: it took us literally 10 minutes to find the USB data port, because it's located on the inside of the printer, not the outside as one might expect. Brother says this reduces the chances of damaging the USB connector if you trip over the cable. To test this reasoning, we deliberately tripped over the cable and dragged the printer to the floor, causing it to shatter into a thousand little pieces.* Turns out Brother was right, the USB connector remained intact. Continue reading...
Samsung ML-1630 and SCX-4500: Printers that bring sexy back
Finally it's been done. Somebody's made printers that don't look rubbish! We'd begun to think it was a lost cause, but mad props to Samsung -- its new luxury printers look absolutely flippin' stunning.
The ML-1630 mono laser (pictured top) and SCX-4500 all-in-one (pictured bottom) are similar in shape to a DVD player or component hi-fi system, and are finished in the same glossy piano-black veneer as Samsung's TVs.
They also have blue touch-sensitive buttons and a sexy OLED-style display. These show letters and numbers made of oversize circular dots -- a bit like on the Samsung YP-K3 MP3 player. Continue reading...
HP EdgeLine CM8060: Super-fast printing
HP has raised its pimp hand to smack its competition with a brand-new printing technology. Known as EdgeLine, the new system can print a massive 60 pages per minute in mono and 50 pages per minute in colour -- it's the Ferrari Enzo of printing.
Crave witnessed the official unveiling of two EdgeLine-equipped machines, the CM8060 and CM8050, at an event in Paris yesterday (get us!). HP bigwig Jan Riecher hit a switch, some curtains pulled back and before us stood the mother of all printers -- a forklift-sized behemoth that rivalled Mr Bean for sheer beigeness.
Looks aside, the CM8060 is a great technical achievement. EdgeLine is an ink-based printing system that uses large, stationary printheads -- arranged in a line -- to dispense ink across the entire width of the page as the paper passes beneath them. Unlike traditional print heads, which squirt ink bit-by-bit across the width of a page, EdgeLine prints entire lines in one go. It's a bit like using a multi-nozzled sprinkler system instead of a hosepipe. Or a guillotine instead of a chainsaw. Continue reading...
