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. Click here for more

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. Click here for more

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. Click here for more

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.  Click here for more

Last week we were invited to attend a rather secretive Kodak briefing in Soho, where the company unveiled a range of magical-sounding new printers. The EasyShare All-In-One range promises not only to deliver high-quality text and photo quality, but also to cut the price of ink in half.

What follows is an excerpt of the conversation that went down between Crave and Kodak's marketing guys*:

Crave: "WTF? A printer that's good and cheap to run?"
Kodak: "Yes -- and for the first time printer ink is no longer as expensive as champagne.
Crave: "ROFL. Prove it"
Kodak: "Fine. As long as we don't have to carry on using IM slang"
Crave: "NP"

The Kodak guys then proceeded to demonstrate the EasyShare 5300 all-in-one -- blowing our tiny little minds in the process. The thing produced a series of absolutely gorgeous 150x100mm (6x4-inch) photos, each of which took about 28 seconds to complete -- that's about half a minute quicker than many dedicated photo printers. Each of the prints was dry by the time it hit the dedicated photo output tray. Click here for more

When we first saw the Canon Selphy ES1 photo printer, we were intrigued by the suitcase cum toaster cum vacuum cleaner cum VCR styling, but we didn't know whether the Frankenstein child of half a dozen household appliances would be as user-friendly as Canon claimed. Yesterday an ES1 thunked on to our desk, so let's see how quickly we can get it printing.

9:20am Open box. In the top tray we find a power brick, the wrong sort of power cable (two-prong European plug) and an all-in-one ink-and-paper cartridge. Precious seconds are wasted while we tear off the plastic wrappings, unravel the twist ties and track down the right sort of power cable. The bottom of the box contains the printer itself, in a protective shell of egg-carton material. We don't seem to have a manual or a software disc, so Canon has probably sent us an early sample (which also explains the power cable). At least we won't be wasting any time reading the instructions.

9:22am Setup. A brief game of 'hunt the power point' ends happily when we find an empty space on one of the nine plugboards lurking under the desk. Opening the paper flap on the bottom is easy, but the top flap doesn't want to flip up... hmm... okay, Canon has spurned the simple open-by-hand flap in favour of a flap that springs open when you press the Open button. Have we become so idle that we can't open our printer flaps by hand? Discuss. Click here for more

Yesterday we went hands on with the Samsung CLP-300 -- which claims to be the world's smallest colour laser printer. Its 390mm by 260mm by 340mm dimensions may not sound impressive on paper, but it's pretty svelte in comparison to the oven-sized Samsung CLP-500.

Let's put it this way: you cannot, we repeat, cannot carry a colour laser printer further than a couple of metres. Not unless you're doped up on steroids and have a titanium endoskeleton. You can't really install one in your home, either -- unless you've got a dedicated office space -- because these things are usually huge.

The CLP-300 impressed us because it is the size of a normal mono laser, or a slightly chubby inkjet. It weighs just 13.6kg so it's reasonably portable -- you can move it from room to room, or lug it to the car without risk of a hernia. Click here for more

You carry the Selphy ES1 like a suitcase, the cable retracts like the power cable on your vacuum cleaner, the cartridge slots into the side like a tape going into a VCR (remember them?) and the output pops out the top like toast from your toaster. And yet it isn't a suitcase, vacuum cleaner, VCR or toaster, it's a compact photo printer. The ES1 is designed to offer maximum convenience in a minimum amount of space, but the household appliances metaphor doesn't quite go far enough: it won't make you a nice cup of tea while you wait for your print to emerge.

The ES1 uses new all-in-one cartridges that contain both ink and photo-size paper. It's a dye-sublimation printer, so ink use can be accurately predicted -- if you buy a 50-sheet pack, you get the right amount of ink for 50 photos. Media comes in four sizes, ranging from credit card size (86x54mm) to postcard size (148x100mm) and prints have a glossy, water-resistant finish.

To achieve the 199x133mm footprint, Canon has had to develop a novel paper-feed mechanism that pushes the paper out the bottom of the printer, pirouettes it through 90 degrees and then sucks it back in. The paper passes up and down through the printer as each layer of colour is applied, then emerges at the top. It's all mildly entertaining, at least for the first two or three prints, but after that you'll want to retreat to the kitchen for the aforementioned cuppa.  Click here for more

Laser printers are normally rather pricey, especially compared to inkjets. Thankfully HP's executives, presumably enjoying some kind of recreational substance, have gone and slashed the price of its LaserJet 1018.

They've cut its price from £80 to just £49. In English money that's just under two ponies, a bullseye or five Ayrton Sennas. Whatever you call it, it's a complete bargain: the monochrome LJ 1018 is nippy enough with a quoted 12 pages per minute print speed, and can spit out the first page in just 10 seconds.

We're off to buy three: one for the home, one for the office, and one to hollow out and turn into the kind of apparatus those HP chaps used to help them achieve a state of price-slashing euphoria. The LaserJet 1018 is available from PC World for £49 from Wednesday, 23, August until the 29th August. -RR

It's incredibly frustrating when you're in the middle of a field or wandering through urban streets and you suddenly realise that you need to print out a document. Admittedly that situation doesn't arise often, but there are times when having a portable printer would be very useful.

Fortunately Pentax has come up with a portable printer called the PocketJet 3 Plus. This diminutive printer measures 255mm by 30mm by 55mm and will easily fit in a rucksack or glove compartment. Click here for more