ScanStik and PrintStick - Pocket Sized Scanner and Printer

If you do your best to achieve a paperless office, but can't avoid dealing with paper documents, here are two small gadgets that will allow you to take your office with your wherever you go.

This ScanStik might look like a slightly enlarged pen... But in reality, it's a full-fledged scanner capable of scanning an entire page in one go in under 4 seconds, and with a quality of up to 600 dpi.

And, because you never know if you'll have to scan a single page or thousands, the ScanStik even has a microSD slot, so you can expand its capacity and store thousands of scanned pages without requiring a PC nearby to offload its documents.

To do that, you need only connect it to any PC via a USB cable, and manage - or even perform OCR - with the included ABBYY FineReader SE and PaperPort OCR software.


When the time comes to do the exact opposite, you can rely on the PrintStik.

This tiny printer uses a self-contained paper cartridge with 20 pages, that allows you to print wherever you may be. You don't even have to worry about toner or ink cartridges, as it uses a high quality thermal printing system.


... When I look at these devices I can't avoid remembering those old "Mission Impossible" TV series episodes, where often we would see similar gadgets doing this sort of thing - but at the time being pure science fiction! It took them a while... but it's now real and within reach of anyone wanting to take a scanner and printer anywhere they go.

Poster Printer - Print in Multiple Pages

Although large format printing is now cheaper and usually is just a drive away from your nearest printing house or shopping mall, there are still times where you might wish to do a larger scale printing using your current printer.

If you're using Windows, you might want to try this old but trusteful Poster Printer. It works by creating a virtual printer you can use to print whatever you want zooming it to as many pages as you want.
Then you just need to cut and paste the pages to form the final, large scale, assembly and marvel at your creation.

Working as a virtual printer has the advantage of working with any program you might have. If, on the other hand, you just need to blow up an image (not a word document, or other kind of file), you might also try this Easy Poster Printer.

... Just be sure you don't waste any more paper than you actually need to. It's quite easy to get carried away and start printing pages after pages of large-scale "puzzles". :)

3D Printing in Titanium

If you completely dismissed 3D printing technologies because it was only able to produce cheap looking plastic pieces, what if I told you can now print 3D objects made of titanium?

Sure, the 3D printer costs a "little bit" more than Makerbot's Cupcake or the Thing-o-matic, kind of 1 million dollars more; but don't worry because thanks to i.materialise anyone can print their creations in titanium.

You're not restricted to printing in titanium (which can cost you about $100), as you have lots of other materials at hand, including different kinds of plastic, and even flexible, translucent, and transparent epoxy.

So, what are you waiting for to create your own amazing 3D pieces, like these ones?

It might take a couple more years (or decades), but the time will come when this type of technology will be as common and as cheap as inkjet printers are today. Just wait and see.

Xerox Prints with Solid Ink

Tired of replacing ink cartridges and toners? It can all become a thing of the past if this new solid ink technology from Xerox is as good as advertised.

This new Xerox color printer uses solid ink - not unlike the crayons we all know - instead of the traditional color powder toners used in laser color printers.
These ink blocks are melted to produce the ink for the printing process, and allow you to print in types of paper that traditional laser printers can't.

For now, this printer is targetting the office/enterprise market - but, if it really works as we expect it to - it should be just a matter of time to see this technology trickle down into consumer grade printers.

One thing's for sure: no longer will you have to complain about your ink cartridges drying out.:)

3D Printing

3D Printing (or rapid prototyping) allows you to print some very complex and beautiful geometric objects never seen before:



Head over to GeorgeHeart to see his amazing creations.

Maybe someday we'll be able to "print" anything we want - from clothes, to food, to fully working complex mechanical and electronic devices.

Care to bet against me? :)