Hold on to your hats as we blast face-first into the whimsical world of laser printers! Samsung has announced the world’s smallest laser printers. That’s right, plural, as in two of them! I don’t know, Samsung. They still look kinda big, unless those girls are both in kindergarten and sitting on a tablet of Advil.

Anyhoo, the CLP-315K (pictured on the right) does 16ppm black and 4ppm color at 2,400 by 600 dpi and the CLX-3175FNK (pictured on the left) handles scanning and faxing. It’s got a USB port that allows you to scan directly to USB memory sticks. Cool.

Not quite sure about prices or availability yet, unfortunately.

Here’s an interesting development: Kyocera is building a new KJ4 series print head that can print at 150 meters per minute at 600×600 dpi, which equates to about 1,000 sheets per minute. Check your box for your current printer’s speed and be amazed.

The head should go into printers next month. Kyocera uses ceramic piezoelectronics to make this 4-inch head squirt out ink faster than a squid at a calamari festival. Sorry for that last joke. It’s early.

Xerox, the textbook definition of “metonym,” wants to guilt-trip you into ditching your [apparently] environmentally devastating printer for one of its own, which are powered by sugar and spice and everything nice. To further its goal, the Norwalk, Conn-based corp has released a slew of online tools to help you determine how much you’re killing Mother Earth with your printer. How much ink is used per printed page, how much energy is consumed, etc. It’s all tallied up and output to a pretty graph like that one up there, which you can later trade with your friends to see who’s greenest.

Personally, I like how Bits asks, “How Green Is Your Printer?” My answer, straight out of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, is “Who gives a damn?” The redder the better, I say.

I do believe Armand Van Helden addressed the environment 10 years ago with his song “Mother Earth,” long before it was de moda.

Yes, even though PMA ended on Saturday, we’re still digging news out of the show. Here’s a good one for any photographer considering buying one of HP’s well-reviewed — including in this publication — wide-format Z-Series printers which are seeing some significant price cuts. Usually this means a new model is on the way, but after meeting with HP at the show, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The way it was explained to us, the lower prices are being offered as an alternative to the previous mail-in rebate program which many people find annoying. (Including us!)

The new price breakdown on these big printers from HP is below.

Dan Havlik is Technology Editor at PDN Magazine and Editor of DemystifyingDigital.com. For more professional photography news, visit PDNonline.com.

Don’t push me, ’cause I’m close to the edge

Some Korean designers designed this hanging printer with a full paper carriage that hangs over your desk and only the print head and roller sit on the desk. It’s not real and no one will ever ship it, but it sure is pretty.

Hang on for dear life [Yanko]

I’ve never much cared for the modern computer printer’s business model. In short, the idea is to push cheap, craptacular printers on the masses, then use them as a loss leader to make money on the ink. This works because printer ink, much like oil, is a commodity that has a per-barrel price. This price fluctuates, and that makes traders money.

Sadly, the price is rising, and it has just topped $1000 a barrel for the first time, ink has been trading since 1964. This means we’ll see prices of computer ink increase across the board. Seeing has how expensive the crap is now, this is in no way a good thing, unless you’re a commodities broker or trader, in which case you’re going to hell.

Printer ink tops $1000 a barrel [New Biscuit]

Shame on you, Staples and HP! Lull us into a false sense of security with your hilarious Easy Button and not hilarious celebrities’-hands-doing-stuff commercials while you pull the wool over our eyes with your printer ink price-fixing. I feel violated, although that might have nothing to do with this HP/Staples stuff.

These are all allegations at this point, so let’s not get too bent out of shape but a man in California is suing HP and Staples for breaking antitrust law, claiming that HP offered Staples "at least $100 million worth of ‘market development funds’ and incentives, in exchange for an agreement to stop selling third-party HP-compatible ink cartridges. According to the lawsuit, Staples then used HP’s exclusivity to raise prices on the HP cartridges it offered."

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DemystifyingDigital is a feature written by Dan Havlik, editor of DemystifyingDigital.com

If you’re scrambling to buy a holiday gift for any of your friends with a digital camera, you can’t go wrong with a portable printer. While in the past these portables were long on cuteness but short on features and print quality, the latest models from Canon, HP, and Epson rival desktop inkjets of days gone by. Best of all for anyone who’s ever mumbled “How do I get my pictures out of my digital camera?” portable printers provide a fast and easy solution for making prints. A great stocking stuffer — provided, of course, that it’s an extra large stocking.
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HP has unveiled a new printing technology, called CloudPrint, that allows you to upload documents to HP’s servers in PDF format and then print them anywhere in the world. You send the file through the free service and receive an SMS with a “pick-up” code. You can then go to any Cloudprint printer — HP provides a handy map — and type in the code to print your document.

This seems a little silly and overwrought to me. A number of technologies — the keyboard, the web browser, and the $2/hour cyber cafe — makes the concept irrelevant. While I can see the value of “printing” a document on your mobile browser to a distant printer, is this really the way to do it? It currently doesn’t even support mobile devices and the “I have to really print this now” market probably consists of two or three uptight business travelers. Your thoughts?

HP invents printing for your mobile [Tech.co.uk]

Going after small businesses and home offices who desire an affordable network-ready tool, Canon has announced the imageCLASS MF4270 laser multifunction printer. The MF4270 is lightning quick and will spew out 21 pages-per-minute. Like whoa! Try to contain your excitement because I’m trying very hard to contain mine. It also prints duplex output directly from your PC, incoming faxes and copies letter-sized documents. The MF4270 even scans in 24-bit color at 9,600dpi! The imageCLASS MF4270 MFP provides a vigorous fax solution in a compact desktop design featuring eight one-touch speed dial numbers, 100 coded speed dial numbers, 256-page memory capacity, PC Faxing, and two-sided duplex output. The imageCLASS MF4270 uses a 33.6 Kbps Super G3 fax for rapid transmissions. All of this can be yours for $299 starting next month.

DemystifyingDigital is a new feature written by Dan Havlik, editor of DemystifyingDigital.com

Printers are the kind of devices you usually ignore until there’s something wrong with them. And with how poorly made and unnecessarily difficult most printers are to use, there’s often something wrong with them. (”PC Load Letter error” anyone?) The following are three idiot-proof printers that do everything you want them to, whether it’s printing photos or text or making copies and scanning images. The only thing they won’t do, is give you a hard time.
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If you’re one of those annoying photographers who hangs around tourist spots offering to take people’s pictures for ridiculous prices, then you’ll certainly be interested in Canon’s latest portable printer. The pint-sized SELPHY CP740 printer spits out 4×6-inch lab-quality photos in less than a minute. It also includes automatic red-eye reduction, a 2-inch color LCD screen and multiple direct-printing options.

The CP740 will be available in the fall for $99.99. At least this way you can print better pictures and people will be more inclined to purchase them.

Press Release

According to a study by TÜV Rheinland, inkjet owners are taking the advice of their printers, throwing out cartridges when the printer says they’re empty. The problem? They aren’t really empty. In fact, the cartridges are over half full when thrown out, and may still have hundreds of pages worth of ink left. I personally run my ink supply into the ground, printing until my pages are streaky and faded. If you use this method, always have some new cartridges in supply.

Inkjet Printers are Filthy Lying Thieves

The Epson R380 is an Ultra Hi-Definition photo printer that relies on some of the same technologies used by professional photo printers. The R380s is the mid-range in Epson’s HD photo printer line with the R260 on the lower end and the RX580 at the top of the line.

Slightly less than 16 pounds, the R380 is approximately 18 inches wide, 21 inches deep and just over 11 inches high and has the foot print of a bulkier scanner /rinter. In fact, it looks like an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier. It uses 6-color cartridges that are accessible from the top and it has a bright LCD and a 5-in-1 card reader. These features may account for the bulky design. There is only one paper feed input and that is on top. The paper feed tray holds about 120 sheets of regular paper or 20 sheets of photo paper.

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Dear HP,

I’ve been using your printers for years and years now. Since I started using Mac OS X more than 5 years ago, the process for installing a printer I thought would become drastically easier. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
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Let’s make some mischief on this amnesty Friday, shall we? All we need is this Brother RL-700S printer that prints out passive RFID tags and we’re golden. Well, more accurately, it uses rolls of tape that contain the proper IC chips, complete with working antenna, which can be programmed with the corresponding data. I’m sure the black hats out there can figure out how to get this printer to generate Mobile Speedpass chips, Lexington Ave NYC subway chips, etc. Or, plainly, use it for crimes that result in long federal prison stays. Sounds good to me. Though the fact that the printer costs some $1,200 and the tape rolls cost $80 a piece somewhat throws a wrench in my plans.

Product Page [Brother via Digital World Tokyo]

I went to Kodak’s Easyshare Printer launch and walked in just as a group of nerds began playing Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet. Yes, real live nerds. Don’t ask me why. I’m as confused as you. See, they made the launch into an extended Saturday Night Live sketch and they ran the entire thing in NBC studios. Feel free to watch some highlights after the jump, but it’s pretty stupid.

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A new service has launched that aims to bring the joys of receiving emails to the Luddite horde. Presto uses a special printer designed by HP. The printer hooks up to a regular phone line, no need for broadband, and automagically prints emails that come to a unique users@presto.com address.

Now the first thing I questioned was how the system avoids spam. Well to circumvent this obvious problem, it only receives emails from accepted friends, so no print spam for Viagra and/or midget porn.
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Epson Ultra Hi-Definition line of photo printers we reported on back in August are now available. So if you’ve got a whole lotta pent up aggression toward your current photo printer, we think it’s about time you took a baseball bat to it and replaced it with one of these beauties that churns out extra-delicious-looking pictures using the company’s new Claria Hi-Definition six-color, dye-based ink that’ll last up to 200 album-kept years and are smudge and scratch resistant.

Epson Stylus Photo RX580 [Product page]

Epson Stylus Photo R260 [Product page]

Epson Stylus Photo R380 [Product page]