The technique is quite similar to litography and has uses outside image drawing

Aug 13, 2012 19:41 GMT  ·  By

A new printing technique has been invented, one that has the potential not only to step beyond the confines of image or text printing, but also to cleanly shatter through that boundary.

Though many may not know it, optical storage, displays of all resolutions and, of course, printers work on the same base principle.

Create a virtual grid with number assigned to each dot, and then paint the dots in certain colors, or drill holes in a disk, or bombard a screen with multi-colored light from behind, or something else along those lines.

It is for this reason that the new printing technique discovered by Singapore researchers can help advance high-resolution reflective color displays and high-density optical storage techniques, much like litography.

A group of scientists have learned how to “print color at the optical diffraction limit” through a nanotechnology technique whose theoretical limit, when creating color images, is of 100,000 dots per inch resolution.

For the sake of comparison, normal inkjet printers can produce a maximum of 10,000 dots per inch.

In order to achieve this feat, the researchers designed metal nanostructures with a precise pattern, whose surface reflect an intended color.

They also “built a database of colors that corresponded to a specific nanostructure pattern, size and spacing.”

The “photo” of a woman shown on the left might not seem like much, until one realizes the scale. “Lena's” likeness is captured in a 50 × 50 µm image. That would mean that an 8-bit image that used to take up the whole screen a couple of decades ago now fits on a surface smaller than the tip of a pencil.

“This printing resolution brings us to the limit of visible-light imaging, where the individual colour pixels are just barely resolvable using diffraction-limited optics,” write Karthik Kumar, Huigao Duan, Ravi S. Hegde, Samuel C. W. Koh, Jennifer N. Wei and Joel K. W. Yang in their treatise.

“Beyond obvious applications in high-resolution print image production, this method can also be used in optical data storage and color filters in lighting and imaging technologies.”

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

Model of the litography-like technology
"Lena"
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