You wanna print BIG?

[howardm]

Everyone wants to print big.

Try printing THIS small............ 

https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2015/12/tiniest-color-picture-ever-printed.html

[Alan Klein]

Who would need a picture this small and for what purposes?

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Who would need a picture this small and for what purposes?

Yeah,

When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory. 
— William Gates, chairman of Microsoft, 1981

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”
— Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

Advances have already been made in printing smaller Integrated Circuit features, rather than exposing them with light, using photolithography (which has its limits in diffraction of light). Also storage of all sorts of information can be made much more compact and, who knows, in the future we might even have a lower quality spin-off available to us that benefits the display of our photographic masterpieces (more durable, more detail, spectral colors).

Cheers,
Bart

[howardm]

Who would need a picture this small and for what purposes?

Who knows?  That! is the beauty of it.

When man discovered the secret of making fire, they probably didn't think about using it to leave the planet

[TonyW]

Quite astonishing what they have achieved and hopefully as already said we may reap the benefits in the future from spin offs.

I remember purchasing a 40 MB HDD at a time when the norm. was no bigger than 10 MB.  IT dept. said "what on earth are you doing wasting money on a drive that size.  You will never fill it"

I wonder what the correct viewing distance is at this size - and maybe we will be able to find out now just how many angels can fit on the head of a pin 

[SanderKikkert]

Quite astonishing what they have achieved and hopefully as already said we may reap the benefits in the future from spin offs.

+1!

I wonder what the correct viewing distance is at this size - and maybe we will be able to find out now just how many angels can fit on the head of a pin 

 

[Phil Indeblanc]

When space is at a all time crunch with over population, and you only have room for the most immediate things in living spaces, you hand your guest a pair of bino's and they can look and enjoy your work. Of course this is after we realized we can't use LCD screens since the aliens have sensitive skin to such UV rays....You come up with your own reasning, but its just super cool. Like a painting on a pinhead or a grain of rize....etc

[Ernst Dinkla]

Who would need a picture this small and for what purposes?

To get attention in this world for a new technology. That technology later on might deliver a higher resolution EVF in our cameras but you never know with quantum dot technology whether it will live or die :-) 10 years waiting for continuous spectral white LEDS based on this technology: http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2012/05/quantum-dots/

Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst

http://www.pigment-print.com/spectralplots/spectrumviz_1.htm
December 2014 update, 700+ inkjet media white spectral plots

[mstevensphoto]

why stop at just a print? here's an atomic level movie    technology is cool and why need only be answered "to see if we could"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0