Printed solar cell tech keeps getting closer and closer to reality, with a Massachusetts company called Konarka Technologies today announcing that it's now able to manufacture solar cells using inkjet printing. There's not a ton of information available about the process, but Konarka's already demonstrated it and published details in a trade journal called Advanced Materials -- which sounds like scintillating reading, if you ask us. Konarka says the process makes fabbing solar panels extremely easy, since it doesn't require a clean room, and the resulting cost reductions could lead to an increased number of applications for solar power. Of course, the economics of inkjet printing have lured more than one company to the dark side -- we wonder if Konarka is eventually going to start selling solar ink cartridges for more than the printers themselves?

[Via The Raw Feed]

One brave, intelligent, and super-cool Boston man has taken the law into his own hands -- vis-à-vis a bunch of attorneys -- and is taking HP and Staples to task for an alleged antitrust scheme. According to Ranjit Bedi, the two companies have been in cahoots in an attempt to stop the sale of inexpensive, third-party printer ink at Staples stores. In the suit, it's suggested that HP paid Staples $100 million to refrain from sale of the cartridges. The story might be harder to believe if it weren't for the nature of the printer ink business, which seems to be rife with companies engaging in questionable business practices (like selling cartridges which give you an inaccurate read on ink remaining, barring the use of third-party cartridges, and wildly overcharging for branded ink). If you've ever owned an ink-jet printer, we're pretty sure you know exactly what we're talking about. People -- it's time to fight back.

Inkjet printers have long been used to print out all sorts of unusual goods, and while we've heard of scientists utilizing said technology to print stem cells, engineers are now exploring ways "to print 3D structures of cells." According to Paul Calvert, a materials scientist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, printing out these cells in three dimensions "is like going from a black-and-white to a full-color [TV]," and he also states that moving the process forward could help "unravel the mysteries of cell-to-cell communication and, perhaps in the distant future, manufacture human organs from scratch." Notably, it was even suggested that the technique could potentially be used to "print out miniature organs for medical tests such as drug toxicity," and in an ideal world, to crank out "implantable human organs on demand."

Making a good poster is hard, but most people wouldn't considering it harder than creating a robot to make the poster for you. Not so for Wyatt Felt, a member of instructables, who created a robot out of not much more than an iRobot Create, an old inkjet, and a sharpie which, put together, can draw perfectly spaced large lettering. Like an inkjet, it's made of individual pixels: but the PosterBot's pixels are the size of a dab of a large sharpie, so the poster is easily readable from a distance. If you want to create a PosterBot yourself, you'll have to have a fair degree of competency with C++, and a whole lot of peripheral kit to build the thing. You make sure to keep at least four PC-Mount DPDT 5v DC relays rated at 1A lying around, don't you?

No doubt about it, vanilla inkjets seem to be garnering a whole lot of attention these days, and while the latest trick won't yield circuits or OLED displays, it could make filmmakers who long for days past quite excited. Jesse England has apparently discovered a fairly easy to automate process to print video frames onto transparency film. After discovering the dimensions for both Super 8 and 16-millimeter film, he simply made a template, arranged the filmstrip using Adobe's Premier and Photoshop, and printed it out on an everyday Epson inkjet. The noticeably manual task of punching out sprocket holes was still left to a hand-powered box cutter, but we're sure there are less tedious solutions just waiting to be implemented. As expected, the actual video quality was deemed "terrible," but the emotional impact was bittersweet indeed. Be sure to hit the read link for the whole low-down and to see a couple of video demonstrations to show you what the fuss is all about.

[Via BoingBoing]

HP is starting to see the first fruits of its $1.4 billion investment in next-gen print technologies with the debut of its new Edgeline enterprise-class color printers. The new printers squirt special fast-drying inks out of dual stationary print heads that run the entire width of the page, a system that offers the color quality of traditional inkjets at laser-like speeds. But as with all good things, there's a catch -- the printers aren't being offered for sale. The Edgeline system is apparently so ink-efficient that HP can't sell the units at competitive prices and make up the difference on consumables sales like it does with its inkjet and laser products. Instead, HP will rent the printers to high-volume customers, with a typical contract running for four years at 20,000 pages per month. That's it for hard details, though: HP hasn't disclosed how much the printer rentals will actually cost, only that average customers will see a 30% drop in printing costs by deploying the new machines. (We've seen estimates of about $25K.) That estimate probably doesn't account for discount third-party ink, however, a cottage industry for which HP has never had much love. We'll see how this lame rental model affects HP's ink business -- it's still certainly better than having the cartridges programmed to expire.

[Via ArsTechnica]

It's been nearly three years since we first reported on printable circuit boards, but researchers in the UK are still working to hone the process. Leeds University's Seyed Bidoki was recently able to load a "standard Hewlett Packard inkjet printer with a solution of metal salts and water" and print out an actual electronic circuit. The mysterious "silver salt solution" and vitamin C mixture could be used to "pave the way for safer and cheaper electronics manufacturing," and moreover, this cheap and easy alternative should certainly be a hit with the environmentally conscience crowd. This method utilizes a water-soluble base, which differs from the less green solvents used in polymer ink / graphite paste varieties from before, but even individuals working with the project admit that ousting the current regime will be difficult. Still, the crew is pressing forward with this toxin-free approach, and hopes to elicit the help of "industrial jet printers" before long to speed things up.

We were pretty stoked to hear Kodak was planning on running full tilt at the current status quo of "loss leader" printer tactics, that has unwitting consumers picking up inkjet printers for a dime, and spending a fortune on printing supplies. Unfortunately, it looks like Kodak hasn't come upon any magical printing techniques to pull this off yet, since its new printers didn't do so good up against the likes of Epson, HP and Canon. Kodak is marketing its printers as capable of producing 10 cent prints, which would indeed be a great deal. Tests show that an $18 pack of paper and ink results in about 165 borderless prints, about 11.5 cents per print. Unfortunately, the prints were basically "draft" quality, maybe fine for certain budget-minded consumers, but hardly comparable to "lab quality" photos. To boost the quality you'll need pricier Kodak paper, which ends up at about 35 cents per print, and renders the whole exercise pointless. The testers recommend the $150 Epson Stylus Photo RX580, for super good prints and great speed. Might want to leave that $200 Kodak EasyShare 5300 on the shelf for the time being.

A bioengineering team from Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh School of Medicine have presented a way to employ techniques based on inkjet printers to help stem cells become bone tissue cells. The team uses a set of inkjet-style streams to shoot little bits of proteins (like droplets of printer ink) on top of nurturing proteins (think of them as the paper) in a certain pattern. Then the team drops stems cells on top of the whole concoction, which depending on what bio-ink was used, can turn into bone-type cells or potentially even other cell types. While human trials are still a ways off, let's just hope that bio-ink cartridges aren't nearly as much of a scam as regular inkjet cartridges are when they reach that point.

[Via NewScientist]

Who wouldn't love a really convenient and easy way to refill those annoying empty inkjet cartridges, besides every printer company ever? With that in mind, KIS/Photo-Me is displaying its new "Rechargink" system at the Photokina exhibition in Germany this week, which is great news for consumers and retailers and terrible blow to HP, Canon, and friends. The Rechargink is basically like a soda fountain dispenser, but for ink, based on what we can tell from this photo -- apparently you belly up to the kiosk with your empty container, pull down the lever, and then you have a functioning ink cartridge again within five minutes. No word on price nor availability, nor on what happens if you try to make a suicide soda version of ink, either.

Epson unveiled three new "Ultra Hi-Definition" photo printers on Monday with the launch of the Stylus Photo R260, R380 (pictured) and RX580 all-in-one. All three share the same print engine and redesigned print heads to print 4x6 photos in just 13 seconds while spitting out B/W or colored text at up to 30 pages per minute -- both bests for Epson photo printers. They also feature Epson's unique, out-of-the-box ability to print direct to printable CD/DVDs dropped into the front-loading tray. The R260 is the base model with the R380 adding memory card slots and a large, 3.5-inch LCD right up front for viewing your shots when printing directly off memory cards; something you'll do oh, maybe once in a lifetime if you're one of the lucky few to actually own a computer at home with even the most rudimentary photo management software installed. The RX580 drops that pointless LCD down to 2.5-inches but brings a 1,200 pixel per inch optical scanner with a useful direct-to-PDF function. As you'd expect, scanned images can then be copied (aka, printed) at that same 30 pages per minute rate. And when combined with Epson's new Claria ink, your photos will last longer than even those produced by a professional lab. Hey, that's what Epson is touting in the hopes of locking you into their replacement ink cartridges for the decades it will take to prove 'em wrong. Expect the R260 to pull $130 with the R380 and RX580 both demanding $200.

[Thanks, Art]