Feature
A mini inkjet prints on any flat surface with a wave of the hand
By Rena Marie Pacella Posted 06.01.2011 at 9:02 am 9 Comments

Quick Inking To print, the user just moves the printbrush over a piece of paper or other surface. The device takes only 10 seconds to print a page. Jonathan Worth

In 2000, one of Europe’s largest rubber-stamp companies approached Alex Breton, an engineer from Stockholm, Sweden, for product ideas. Instead of dreaming up a new stamp, he designed the PrintBrush, an 8.8-ounce handheld gadget that uses inkjets, computer-mouse-like optics and navigation software to print uploaded images and text on any flat surface, including paper, plastic, wood and even fabric.

Conventional printers move paper through the machine in large part because it’s the only way to accurately track the position of the page relative to the print head. With such constraints, Breton realized, a printer could never be narrower than its paper—unless the inkjets had an entirely new way to navigate across the page.


That’s the allure of the PrintBrush. The device operates more like a computer mouse than a printer. Laser sensors, originally developed by Philips, track the printer’s movement and pinpoint its position. The sensors continuously emit infrared laser beams toward the paper’s surface as the user moves the device over it. They then measure the scattering of the reflected beams, which—along with the beams’ power fluctuations—determines the device’s velocity and direction of motion. Even small amounts of reflected laser light are enough to track motion, so the lasers work on almost any type of surface.

How It Works: PrintBrush: As the user slides the printbrush across a sheet of paper, optical sensors track the velocity and direction of the printer relative to the page. a controller matches the location coordinates to a pixel map of the document or image and runs algorithms to predict which pixel to print next.  Blanddesigns.co.uk

It took less than two years to develop the first prototype but nearly a decade more to get it right. With each new version, Breton and the team of optics engineers and other experts he recruited refined the navigation system, most recently replacing LED-based sensors with the lasers. They also added color, which required writing a set of algorithms to quickly formulate the ink combinations needed to produce the appearance of 16 million different shades.

By early next year, a PrintBrush with a built-in camera for instant photo printing will hit the market and officially claim the title of world’s smallest printer. Breton will release an even smaller model, the A4, shortly thereafter.

Name: PrintBrush
Inventor: Alex Breton
Time: 11 years
Cost: $10 million

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9 Comments

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Lunarbeam
05/20/11 at 6:27 am

I just heard a rumor that this amazing little gadget will be available for pre-order soon at Kickstarter.com
Hope it really will be, because it seems really cool!!

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Brian H
05/27/11 at 4:58 am

Instant temp body-tattoos are one of the first ways it will be used, I betcha!

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crackerhead
05/29/11 at 6:28 pm

But how BIG will it go ? U talking wall posters or wallets ?

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alcoholicAFRICAN
06/01/11 at 10:39 am

Graffiti Artists will have a field day with this invention.

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dontbother
06/01/11 at 4:08 pm

A nice idea, but what are the practical applications for this device?

I certainly wouldn't want to print a document(s) with this thing. Maybe it could be used for printing shipping labels directly onto the packaging.

I doubt that the resolution will be fine enough that I would want to print decent quality photographs with it.

Anyone else have ideas?

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dragoness
06/01/11 at 10:54 pm

Dude! His little demo in the video totally used my cheetah artwork! Now I have to go back in my email archives and see if I ever gave him permission to use it...

Crazy that I randomly surfed to this page and saw it...

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Abooth
06/03/11 at 3:32 pm

What an excellent device. I can see this being used universally.

Just think if you want to give someone a copy of a page you have stored. You just find some blank paper and wave it over it.
Then you put your favorite pictures on your wall by printing directly on the wall.

How about advertising, where you print the latest offers on a roll of paper and put them on a sandwich board, door etc.

How about an industrial application, where street advertising would be simplified by the signs having a roll of blank paper instead of pasting up the posters. Just roll out some more blank paper, tear off the old advert then wave a downloaded advert on to the blank, instead of shipping posters from the printers.

How about creating your own T-Shirts by creating/obtaining an image, put it in the device then wave it over the shirt (using the right ink)

How about waving it over an envelope to put your return address on it?

How about creating a diagram on a white board by selecting an object on the printer (like a server icon or a database icon) then waving that over part of the white board (using erasable ink)

There are so many applications for this device, it's incredible. If the company went public, I'd put a ton into their shares before product release.

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echo14
06/05/11 at 2:41 am

Great idea! I'll buy it the second it comes out.

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BlazeEagle
11/19/11 at 9:52 am

to dontbother,

Your letting your skepticism cloud your imagination as well as your reading comprehension. This article gave a few examples...

With the correct ink types, One can print on t-shirts, cars, model kits, walls, the list goes on.

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