The guys over at Make: put together this hack where you crack open the cartridge from your inkhet printer and replace they yellow ink with lemon juice. Print anything you want in yellow, and the page looks blank. But apply some iodine or heat the page with an iron, and your secret message will be revealed. Check out the overly complex and sloppy process in the video below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

It’s a huge pain in the ass, and looks really messy, but the results are kind of cool. Of course, you could do the same with just some lemon juice and a paintbrush or Q-Tip, but what fun would that be. This is way more geeky.

You can grab the full instructions from Make: here [PDF file].

Artist Faith Pearson took a bunch of empty cartridges and turned them into fun miniature versions of movie scenes and models.

I think the Starship Enterprise is the best one, because the entire thing is made up out of cartridges. For all the others, the carts really just serve as scenes for the toy figures to hang out in. Still, one with the theater and all the action heroes is pretty cool, and certainly a much better use for leftover ink cartridges than throwing them in the trash.

[via BuzzFeed via TechEBlog]

A group of researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine has developed new tech that is described as being similar to an ink jet printer that is able to print skin directly onto a wound (Opens PDF doc). The printer sprays a combination of skin cells, collagen, and blood coagulants onto the wound that form skin once mixed at the print head. Naturally, the wound still has to heal, but the hope is that the printer tech could one day replace the need for skin grafts.

Once perfected, the process could be used to treat soldiers with injuries on the battlefield.

[via Technology Review via DVICE]

These lighting fixtures are first scrubbed of ink, then drilled, dremel-ed out and assembled into composite hanging lamps or individual ink cart lamps.

They’re available as single lamps ($30 USD), 4-cartridge box pendants ($45) or as an 8-cartridge chandelier ($150). Colors include matte black, cyan, light-cyan, magenta, light-magenta, yellow, light-black, and light-light-black depending on your mood. Personally, I’m always running out of magenta. I’m not quite sure what that says about me.

Now I don’t know what’s going in Durham, North Carolina, but I found variants of these lamps from two different Durham-based Etsy shops – LowellAndLouise and boxlightbox, both of whom are selling what look like the same ink cartridge lamps. I don’t know if these are the same guys, had the same idea at the same exact time, or if somebody just swiped somebody else’s idea. Whatever the case, I think they look cool.

[via The Design Town]

Mark James’ Cardboy CMYK Cartridge critters comes in the four familiar printer ink colors, cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

The 4-inch tall figures are available individually for £5.95 (appx. $12 USD) each, or as a complete set for £19.95 (appx. $41 USD).

Unlike regular printer ink cartridges, you won’t have to replace these guys every twenty pages.

[via Pocket-lint]

While its design might be a bit outlandish, functionally, it’s pretty robust for a dedicated photo printer. Retailing for $249.99, it’s not as cheap as some other standalone photo printers, but its definitely more feature rich. The A826 can handle edge-to-edge photo prints in wallet, 4×6, 5×7 and panorama sizes, but nothing larger. HP claims the printer’s premium grade Vivera ink and paper technologies offer instant drying, water-resistant prints.

Thanks to its built-in memory card slots, Bluetooth connectivity and and 7-inch color LCD screen, you can do all of you photo importing and selection without ever having to touch your computer. The printer’s touchscreen interface lets you easily select images, and even embellish your photos by adding text, borders and special effects. The image editing capabilities can remove red eye, slim down your portly friends and enhance colors directly on screen. There’s even the ability to use the screen for running slideshows when the printer tray is closed.

So if you’re looking for an easy all-in-one photo printing solution, it’s definitely worth a look. For more details on the A826, check out HP’s online store.

This new technology, developed by Silverbrook Research, will enable ridiculously fast desktop inkjet printers and could totally revolutionize the printing industry. Check out these amazing videos of several prototype Memjet printers in action, including photo, label and wide-format devices. As I reported earlier, the device uses a series of 20mm wide printheads joined together to form massive, page width printheads to enable lightning-fast print speeds.

The technology can print 8.5″ x 11″ black-and-white documents at 60 pages per minute, and 4×6 full color prints at 30 pages per minute. Each printhead is controlled by a specialized chip capable of calculating an astounding 900 million dots per second of data. Typical business-class Memjet printers are expected to retail for under $300. Consumables are also supposed to be significantly less costly than typical inkjets.

Memjet is definitely one to watch, and I personally can’t wait to see one of these printers up close and personal.

[Press Release]

Australia’s Silverbrook Research has circulated a video of the prototype device in action, churning out pages at an astounding thirty pages per minute in full color, sixty pages in black and white:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Their “Memjet” technology claims to achieves these stellar speeds by using a print head that spans the entire width of a page. The printer has a target retail price of $150 and a cost per print of $0.02 to $0.06 which would be substantially less than today’s inkjet printers.

[via Texyt via Engadget]