Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

When traveling on business, most people tend to rely on Kinko’s or Staples when they need something printed. The downside of course is that you have to deal with Kinko’s and Staples employees, who barely know how to push the copy button. So for those who are tired of trying to teach the person behind the counter how to open a PDF comes the PIXMA iP100 portable printer from Canon. The iP100 is actually an upgraded version of the iP90v, with improved resolution and speed. The iP100 can print up to 20 black and white documents a minute at a resolution of 600×600, or about 14 color documents a minute with a resolution of 9600×2400. It uses just two ink cartridges to keep the printer’s size compact, with the black ink tank being increased by 50% capacity in this model.

While the printer can be plugged in to a power outlet like your standard desktop model, it also features an optional lithium ion battery pack which will allow you to print 290 pages on a three hour charge. As for connectivity, the iP100 can connect to your laptop via USB, directly to a camera using the PictBridge protocol or even a cellphone or PDA using infra-red or an optional Bluetooth module. ($49.99) The PIXMA iP100 should be available this month for $249.99, while the lithium ion battery pack is an extra $99.99.

[ Canon PIXMA iP100 Mobile Inkjet Printer ] VIA [ SlashGear ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I suppose that part of the ‘tough’ image associated with tattoos is having to go through the tattooing process itself. But we at OhGizmo! are all for any solution that skips the pain part of getting ink done. That’s why this inkjet tattoo paper is so awesome. Not only is it painless, but it allows you to turn any design or image on your PC into a temporary piece of body art.

Actually creating your own tattoo design is probably the hardest part. Once it’s printed you just need to apply an adhesive sheet to the printout and smooth out any bubbles. When you remove the adhesive sheet, the printed tattoo will be left with a sticky surface allowing it to be applied to your skin with a wet sponge. The tattoos are water-based and non-toxic, so while they’ll stick around for about a week if you avoid bathing or showering, they can easily be removed with just soap and water.

A single A4 sized sheet of Inkjet Tattoo Paper is available from Crafty Computer Paper for about $5, while a 5 pack is about $25. So there’s no real savings for buying in bulk.

[ Inkjet Tattoo Paper ] VIA [ MAKE: Blog ]

By Andrew Liszewski

The Kyocera Corporation recently announced that it has developed the world’s fastest high-resolution inkjet printhead for commercial applications. In fact the KJ4 Series achieved a print speed of 150 meters per minute on a Miyakoshi MJP600 commercial printer, at a resolution of 600×600 dpi. That translates to about 1,000 A4-sized pages a minute, or an even more impressive 16 pages a second.

To pull off this feat, the company applied its proprietary piezoelectric ceramics technology to create a compact piezo actuator that controls the ink flow. And its this component that makes the high-speed, high-resolution printing possible. While the KJ4 series was tested in a commercial printer, I’m not entirely sure if it will ever be available in consumer level inkjet printers. At least not one that’s capable of spitting out 1,000 pages a minute.

[ KYOCERA Introduces World’s Fastest Drop-on-Demand Inkjet Printhead ] VIA [ 7Gadgets ]

By Evan Ackerman

Printers are a pain in the butt. I have used printers for one reason and one reason only in the last few years, and that has been to print out airline boarding passes. I would LOVE to be able to use a printer to make photo prints, but that’s always more expensive pain in the butt-ness, since you blow through ink and have to use fancy paper to get decent results. The Canon PIXMA MX7600 solves half of that problem, since it’s designed with “the ability to produce crisp graphics and text on plain paper with the incorporation of the new Pigment Reaction (PgR) technology.” I have no idea how PgR technology works, but the result is that “curling, ink bleeding and printing through the paper sometimes associated with color inkjet printing on plain paper is dramatically reduced.” Cool, now explain to me why it costs MORE money to replace an ink cartridge than it does to buy a new printer, and I might start paying attention. The MX7600 can spit out a 1200 dpi 4×6 color print in 43 seconds, has six (!) ink tanks including a clear ink, can scan and copy and fax, and includes a card reader. MSRP of $400, available sometime this month.

[ Canon PIXIMA MX7600 ] VIA [ SlipperyBrick ]

By Evan Ackerman

It’s a fact: give me a piece of paper, and I will lose it. Paper is such an impractical medium nowadays, but that doesn’t stop people from printing stuff out, giving it to me, and then complaining when it disappears. I guess maybe if I had a printer like the Canon ImagePRESS C7000VP, I might start printing things besides airplane boarding passes. This is a serious, serious printer. It requires 33 feet of wallspace (!) and costs a shade over $280,000. It comes with a trimmer, finisher, inserter, stacker, binder, capacity for 10,000 sheets of paper, and can print 70 pages per minute at 1200 dpi. The internal computer is a dual core 3.0ghz Xeon with 2 gigs of ram and a couple raided 80gb HDs.

Honestly though, what do you do with a printer like this? My recommendation is to save yourself some money by getting, say, 70 1ppm printers instead, and then pay some poor sap to keep track of print jobs and do all the trimming, finishing, inserting, stacking, and binding by hand. I bet you can pay them six figures and still have tons of money left over to send to me for giving you such practical advice.

[ Canon C7000VP (In Japanese) ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

By Luke Anderson

One of my many bad habits is that I never label my CDs when I burn them. I use a Sharpie once in a while, but my handwriting is so bad that I never know what I wrote anyway. Sure, I could print out labels and affix them to the CD, but that’s a pain. That’s why I like this new Casio CW-E60 Title Printer.

This little device will use a thermal transfer ribbon to print the label onto your disc. The Title Printer comes with simple software to design your labels. You can choose from 8 different colored ribbons for your prints. The printer will set you back $60.

[Casio] VIA [EverythingUSB]

By Andrew Liszewski

While dedicated DVD and CD printers are far quicker and usually produce better results than an inkjet with disc-printing capabilities, they can be pretty expensive. But the labeling empire known as DYMO feels that the average household could use a standalone disc printer and have created the DiscPainter to sell to the masses.

But, if quality and speed aren’t that important to you the company has come up with another selling point they call RadialPrint technology. The best way to describe it is like that old Twirl-A-Paint toy, where the disc is printed from the inside edge to the outside edge while it spins. But instead of ending up with random smeared paint blotches, you get a high-quality finish. The DiscPainter also includes custom DYMO software for creating the label, but it can also be used with the standard design tools like Photoshop or Illustrator.

With an expected retail price of about $279, if you only print the occasional disc you might be better off with an inkjet printer that includes this functionality. But if quality and speed are important, you’re not going to find a dedicated disc printer like this any cheaper.

[ DYMO DiscPainter ] VIA [ Chip Chick ]

By Andrew Liszewski

While a truly ‘paperless office’ is still many years away, it seems a completely wireless one is almost within our reach. As long as you ignore the need for power cords, you can pretty much eliminate all the other wires through the use of cell phones, bluetooth and of course wifi.

The latest devices to at least cut one of their cords are printers. Thanks again to wifi, those annoying and limiting parallel port, USB and network cables are a thing of the past. While I have seen wifi printers in stores before, Lexmark seems to be the first manufacturer to be really gung-ho about the idea, and have released an entire line of affordable wifi printers with no extra hardware or adapters needed.

I had a chance to look at the Lexmark X4550 All-In-One printer which is one of the company’s first wireless models. You can read my impressions and full review after the jump, or just look at the pictures if you feel you’ve already done enough reading for the day, I’ll understand.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Andrew Liszewski

Not content with just letting users view their photos on a printer’s LCD screen, HP has upped the ante on their Photosmart A826 model by including a 7-inch touch screen. It’s not only the largest display you’ll find on a consumer printer, but it also allows you to perform many photo editing tasks that usually require access to a PC and specialized software.

You can add captions to a photo either by writing directly on the screen with a stylus (included) or your finger (not included) or by typing them in on a touch screen keyboard. You can also doodle on a photo, adding mustaches, knocked-out teeth and eye patches which is always comedy gold. For those photos that didn’t turn out as perfect as you’d like you can even use the stylus to remove red eye, adjust the contrast and other basic corrections.

At $249.99 it’s probably not the type of printer you’re going to replace in 6 months, but if you like to skip the PC step when it comes to printing your photos this seems like a good solution.

[ HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center ] VIA [ Popular Science ]

By Andrew Liszewski

While Lexmark has never really taken any ‘best in class’ awards when it comes to printers their hardware is relatively cheap which is what a lot of people look for. So it’s no surprise that the company is one of the first to provide a truly affordable model with built-in wifi for wirelessly sharing the printer among multiple computers.

The Z1420 uses 802.11g which should make it compatible with the average home wireless network but it also has a USB connection for hooking directly to a wifi-less computer when needed. It can print up to 24 ppm in black and 18 ppm in color but when printing at the max resolution of 4800×1200 on glossy paper don’t expect it to be quite as fast. And from what I can tell it also uses a single color cartridge which kind of sucks since the whole thing needs to be replaced when one of the colors runs out.

But if you need a cheap wireless printer you probably can’t beat the Z1420’s $79.99 price tag.

[ Lexmark Z1420 ] VIA [ Chip Chick ]