An inkjet rendering of a picture has become the tiniest printed image ever made, necessitating the use of a pretty high-tech microscope to even view it. According to researchers from ETH Zurich and the start-up Scrona in Switzerland, which collaborated on the project, it is the size of the thickness of a piece of paper.
The image, a picture of some tropical fish, was produced with the help of quantum dot technology, which is also currently being used for luxury HD television sets. According to the BBC, the real life fish depicted in the picture are 3,333 times larger than the size of those in the 0.08 mm by 0.115 mm (0.003 in by 0.005 in) image.
The resolution of the image is comprised of 25,000 dots per inch (dpi), with 500 nanometers (0.0005 mm) of space in between each respective dot. The image used red, green and blue color layers; the blue dots produced by the inkjet printer were the smallest of the bunch, followed by the green dots, leaving the red dots as the biggest among the three colors.
The attractiveness of quantum dots for this kind of project, as well as their implementation in TV manufacturing, stems from the fact that they emit a drastically rich, different color according to size, and are much more low-cost than producing OLED screens, which are usually used for high quality TVs — indicating that good things do come in small packages, indeed.
"In a futuristic scenario, you could imagine having a plastic foil that goes into a printer and on the other side there is a display coming out," Patrick Galliker, one of the scientists on the project, said in an interview with the BBC.
"You'd have all the functionality of a [video] screen, which has just been printed using nanomaterials that are in a liquid phase," he explained.
The picture was verified as the smallest inkjet-printed image ever produced by the Guiness Book of World Records earlier this month.
"[As] a technical exercise to demonstrate the sheer versatility of what quantum dot technology can do with regards to imaging," commented Chris Green, a tech expert at Lewis, a consultancy business firm, "it's an absolutely fascinating demonstration of what can be achieved with what is not that expensive technology."
Via: BBC
