PrintBrush: The world's smallest printer -- and it's British

It's been a long time coming, but British company PrintDreams reckons it's ready to unveil the world's smallest printer: the PrintBrush.

The PrintBrush will print to A4 size, in black and white, at up to 600dpi resolution. As you can see from the video, you sweep it across the paper by hand, which means you can print on notebooks, greetings cards, boxes, sleeping badgers and other things that won't quite fit into a traditional printer no matter how much you wongle them about. It's also planned to be silent, so you can use it to print in meetings, recording sessions and funerals. And all this in a package weighing just 250g.

That's even smaller than the Polaroid Two, but we'll let that go seeing as the Polaroid is a camera as well. The PrintBrush connects directly to computers and other devices via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or infrared.

It's expected to cost around $200 (£120). The concept first appeared in 2003, which is about a million years in tech years -- we weren't even born in 2003 -- and comes close to qualifying for our list of vapourware. But now PrintDreams reckons we'll see the PrintBrush available by the end of 2009, for realsies this time.

Or maybe early 2010. No rush.