Digitizing The World » technology

Polaroid 2.0 and 3.0: Zink Printer Technologies

sbennett — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:08:00 +0000

Continuing the discussion of Polaroid that I started in the demise of Polaroid… IEEE Spectrum has published two relevant articles this year.

The first article, Polaroid 2.0, declared that the first product to come out of the remains of Polaroid — the engineers formed a new company called Zink to continue the work that was started before the parent Polaroid corporation died – dead on arrival. The article cites the costs, and the toy-like characteristics of this first product – small prints, inconvenient — and consigns it for novelty use only. They also cited it’s inclusion in a toy-like camera by Tomy as the beginning of the end for the product.

I think that this is a typical response to disruptive innovation. “It will only work for low-end applications.” “It’s too expensive.” “It doesn’t perform as well as my current XXX.” All true. All completely missing the point.

The second article in the print Spectrum, Zink: A Modern Fairy Tale, (online title is “Zink: Inkless Printing With Colorless Color”) was a bit more even handed in its treatment of Zink and their product plans. It also gave a much more detailed view of how the technology works and what it takes to bring a technology to life after the death of the parent corporation.

The technology itself is very clever. Paper is permeated with three chemicals that are uncolored initially. However, when they are heated, the change colors to produce yellow, magenta, and cyan colors, respectively. The trick is that the chemicals change color at different temperatures and with different heating times. A very clever design in the print head and controlling electronics (along with these magic chemicals) applies the right temperatures for the right amount of time to get the colors to mix properly to form full color images. Interestingly, they don’t use a black chemical – analogous to the black inks in most ink jet printers. Perhaps they can produce satisfactory blacks by using the CMY colors. In an inkjet printer this may be too expensive (in terms of ink used) or produce poor results (too much ink required to do it precisely without bleed to adjacent pixels?). This is an amazing piece of research and engineering.

I haven’t seen any sample prints from these printers.

So… if Zink has their way there will be no more ink to buy for our printers. But you will need to buy this special (patented, and presumable not cheap) paper. Hmmm. I think that I would rather buy ink, even though it is a pain and it is expensive. At least I can choose my paper form, format, texture, etc. without needing to have support from a single paper manufacturer. And… I can use generic ink, even though it is a big pain a lot of the time.

The Forever Disk, part 2

sbennett — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:45:00 +0000

Henry O’Connell of Millenniata contacted me shortly after I posted on the blog about the Forever Disk and we traded a couple of emails.

I’m glad to see that they claim that Alpha testing will begin in 2009 (according to their press release), though like all technology, I suspect it will be product later than the engineers and business people would like. With the push toward online backup and cloud-based computing and storage, I wonder what the lifetime of these technologies will be like – and how much in sales are needed to pay for the R&D. I suspect that this is not an easy business.

The Forever Disk

sbennett — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:59:00 +0000

Interesting product possibilities from Millenniata (http://www.millenniata.com/). They claim to have an optical disk (a DVD) that will last 1000 years and is backwards compatible with existing DVD readers. You need a new drive to create the disks, but you can use your existing drives to read them.

So… what happens when I no longer have a DVD drive? I guarantee you that I won’t in 100 years – after the Singularity

The Singularity

sbennett — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:11:00 +0000

The technological “singularity” is an imagined point in the future where our creations — self-improving intelligence machines — leads to unprecedentedly rapid technological progress. Some envision humans merging with machines in interesting or unknown ways.

IEEE spectrum this month has a series of articles on the “singularity”. A reasonably nice spread of opinions on the subject from the obviously smitten to the hesitant. No outright rejectors… this is a technology magazine for technology people, after all. Ray Kurtzweil wrote a very popular book that is a good read. It will have you wanting to believe.

Artificial intelligence is an interesting field to watch. For decades, practitioners have been saying that nirvana is 10 years off. It still is. Only this time, it is 20-50 years off and it isn’t as simple as a machine that can play chess, or translate languages. Instead, it is a self perpetuating, self-improving machine that in a flash improves well beyond human capabilities. “Singularity” sounds to me like the usual AI rubbish.

On the other hand… there is definitely some truth built into the arguments used by the advocates of the singularity. Hardware is improving (and has been for decades). We are putting rudimentary devices into our bodies (with stunning success in some limited circumstances). Things that were once dreams of AI are becoming standard fare in some places. Some have limited acceptance because they are only “almost” there — think speech recognition used to replace people in corporate call centers. We have a computer that plays chess extremely well. So what? People want to believe that hard things are fundamentally human, but we come to realize that they are problems that can be addressed as computational problems. Hence this shows that the way that the human brain thinks is not the only way to solve problems — Deep Blue is definitely different than Gary Kasparov. So maybe we don’t need to understand the human brain well to build an “intelligent” being.

Complex software, on the other hand, isn’t getting any easier to write — in fact getting more difficult. For this reason, I think that we are a long ways from the singularity. Even with hardware capable of a huge amount of calculations, software still has to tell it what to do. And doing true, general purpose AI will require some tremendously complex programming.

I guess that I’m not a believer. I would like to be a believer. But I’m just not.