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

By Rich Trenholm on 16 September 2009, 6:11pm

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.

Comments 3

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weetanhops 16 September, 2009 19:53

So if you're doing it by hand, how accurate is the final print-out going to be? Surely there's major alignment issues?

the dandy p 16 September, 2009 23:45

Notice how the video shows someone printing A4 size documents on paper substantially larger...this just seems like they made it just because they could, not because of practicality or demand.

Rich Trenholm 17 September, 2009 10:35

Weetanhops, it knows where you are on the page, so you don't have to carefully move across the page like a normal printer head - from what I've seen, you can randomly wave your hand round the paper and the PrintBrush will print the right bits.