Unloading a document off your iDevice and printed onto some dead tree sheets is easier said than done, especially in a corporate environment. Sure, there’s AirPrint, but there are tons of different printers in your office and they may or may not play well with the technology. That’s where xPrintserver comes in. It’s an iPhone sized device that plugs into your network and automatically discovers all the printers. Connect to it through your mobile device and print away. The xPrintserver comes preloaded with drivers for over 4,000 printers, including from brands like HP, Brother, Epson, Canon, Dell, Lexmark, and Xerox. Yes there are app that may do the same thing already for free, but remember this is for the office. And as such, you might be able to chalk the $150 price tag up to a legitimate business expense.
The promise of a paperless office where computers, phones and electronic devices completely replace our need for printed documents is certainly tantalizing. But it’s still no where in sight. I might have minimal need for a printer at home, but visit any busy office and you’ll still find copiers and laser printers running around the clock. So instead of trying to sell us on some paperless dream, a PR company called St. Joseph Communications, working with HP and PrinterOn, have developed a public pay kiosk allowing users to print off documents for a small fee.
Printing reports, presentations, maps or travel plans are all handled by a “best-in-class” HP color laser printer. While photos instead come from a Citizen dye-sublimation printer, which probably costs a little more. Documents can be wirelessly sent from a smartphone or tablet using HP’s ePrint app, securely emailed directly to the kiosk from your laptop, or even accessed from a flash drive or memory card. There’s no word on what the service costs, but since most users will probably be using them in a pseudo-emergency type situation, you can bet it’s probably not going to be dirt cheap. But you can find out for yourself if you happen to be passing through Toronto’s Pearson International Airport where the first eight kiosks have already been installed.
That paperless office we’ve been promised is still no where in sight. And if you feel a little guilty about the sheer quantity of printed material you or your office produces, a charitable organization called Plant a Tree promises to plant 1 tree in an endangered forest for every 100 pages you print. With the funding for this project coming from selling ad space, which appear in the footer of every single page you print.
To make the system work the user downloads and installs a special Print a Forest program on their PC, which creates a virtual ‘Print a Forest’ printer that they send every document too. The program keeps track of how many pages are printed from a given printer, and inserts ads on the bottom of every page. So a constant internet connection is required. After printing to the ‘Print a Forest’ app you’ll then need to choose the actual printer you want to print to, so the system does add an extra step. But when you crunch the numbers, on average for every single tree that’s cut down to make paper, 75 new trees will get planted. (Assuming everyone using the paper also uses Print a Forest.)
Printers are this close to becoming obsolete technology. I mean, paper in general is just a terrible idea these days… All kinds of catastrophic things can happen to paper (fire, loss, airplanes, etc.), and not only that, but it can kill you. I do admit that on occasion, having a printer comes in handy, like the few times a year when I need to print a boarding pass or some labels, and this is why the PrintBrush is basically my fantasy printer: it’s small, it’s fast, it’s silent, and 99.9% of the time I can pretend that I don’t actually own a printer at all.
The PrintBrush is a real product, not a concept, and you really do just wave it back and forth over a piece of paper like in the video. It’ll cover a full size sheet of paper at 600 dpi (black and white only) and uses Bluetooth and rechargeable batteries to print without any wires whatsoever. The real beauty of the PrintBrush is that it’ll print on any flat surface you like, meaning that you can print addresses directly onto letters, for example. It even prints on fabric. It works using some kind of crazy accurate optical sensor, sort of like the thing that optical mice use, except way better ’cause it can detect tilt and rotation in addition to translation. Supposedly, the PrintBrush is due out in early 2010 for $199 USD… They have working examples, which is good, and a production plan, which is good, and some dates, which is good, but their last press release is eight months old so as cool as the PrintBrush is, I wouldn’t hold your breath on this one.
I had the opportunity to visit New York for the first time earlier this year. I have to say that Times Square is one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen. The lights and giant screens are awe-inspiring at night. Well how would you like to get one of your own pictures up on a giant screen in Times Square? One company is giving you a chance to do just that.
CanvasPop is a new company that promises to take any of your pictures from Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket (or wherever you have your pictures uploaded) and will print them on a large canvas. They promise to work with any resolution (they specifically list the iPhone as a source), and still have good-looking results. Well if you’re one of their first 500 customers, you’ll be able to put one of your own pictures up on a big screen in Times Square. It’ll only be up for 15 seconds, but you’ll receive a picture of the screen showing your picture, complete with date and time. Prices start at $30 for an 8×10 canvas, and go up.
We spent a good portion of Thursday morning listening to HP’s execs talk about their new products with an enthusiasm of near onanistic intensity. Sure, their lineup of laptops, printers and desktops is slick and all, but we here are OhGizmo! tend to stay away from the “Bigger, Faster and Slimmer” school of technological innovation. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to hear HP had been working on an application for the iPhone which allows you to print any pictures you take directly from your phone, on any of HPs WiFi enabled printers connected to your network. We’re not talking revolution here, but it is an added bit of functionality that’s more than welcome on the iPhone.
It will print pictures up to 4″ by 6″, and is available right now from the App store. I saw a demo, and it works just as advertised.
One side note. I’m amused by the fact that HP refers to the “App Store” with quotation marks on their web page. I guess they’re still “getting used” to this whole “iPhone thing”.
It’s easy to share a digital photo via email or a public website, but how do you accommodate those family members who haven’t quite embraced the digital age just yet? Well one option is to upgrade your digital photo frame to one of these models from Prinics which feature a built-in 5×7 printer. That way, when your parents are scrolling through baby photos and lamenting about how they’d really love a copy of a particular shot, you can print one out for them right then and there.
The printers use a special, self-contained photo paper & ink cartridge that’s extremely easy to replace, and since the cartridges are completely sealed, they apparently have an unlimited ‘use-by’ date. I’m not sure how much the cartridges cost (which is a factor that could make or break the product) but each one is good for 36 shots. The Prinics frames come in either 7 or 8 inch models and besides the printer they also feature memory card slots, an easy to use GUI, a remote control and even patterned or plain black acrylic frames. Unfortunately the Prinics site is a little vague when it comes to pricing, but if they intend to compete in the 5×7 photo printer market they’ll have to aim for a reasonable MSRP.
Looking for an affordable all-in-one printer? While I usually recommend people use a professional print facility for making hard copies of their digital photos, there are still times when having a printer at home can be very convenient. And you’re probably not going to find a better bargain than the $99.99 Epson Stylus NX400. Sure there are even cheaper all-in-one models on the market, but over the years I’ve come to prefer Epson when it comes to hardware reliability and print quality.
The NX400 can spit out black or color text documents at a rate of 34 pages a minute, and can produce a borderless 4×6 print in about 26 seconds. It also features a scanner bed, built-in memory card slots, PictBridge support and a 2.5 inch LCD display that allows you to do everything from make copies to touch up photos without having to boot up your PC. The NX400 also uses Epson’s instant dry DURABrite Ultra Ink which allows your prints to be handled as soon as they come off the printer and also makes them smudge, water and fade resistant.
Of course it’s no secret that printer manufacturers are happy to sell their hardware on the cheap and make their real money when it comes to replacement ink cartridges. But a high-capacity black ink cartridge for the NX400 runs $19.99, while a set of cyan, magenta and yellow DURABrite Ultra Ink cartridges runs $37.04. Definitely not dirt cheap, but not terribly expensive either.
While the world is slowly moving away from the need for printed documents, it will still be some time before we can ditch our printers altogether. In fact I really only use mine for printing the occasional ticket or other travel documents, which is what the Printstik from Planon seems ideal for. At just 1″ x 10.75″ x 1.9″ it’s small enough to be stored in the bottom of your laptop bag for when those random ‘print emergencies’ come up while on the road.
It features a USB port for connecting to a laptop as well as Bluetooth for printing documents directly off of a smartphone or PDA. One thing I particularly like is that it uses replaceable thermal paper cartridges instead of ink. Each cartridge contains 20 pages, which means everything is self-contained in the Printstik. On a single charge you can expect to run off about 40 pages at 200DPI, and it has a print speed of about 3 pages per minute. The Printstik itself is available from the Planon website for $299.99, while a three-pack of replacement paper cartridges runs $24.99.
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