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I am tired of expensive ink cartridges that dry out.
Imagine a printer that uses the same leads as mechanical pencils (0.3mm, 0.5mm, 0.7mm, 1.1mm are all common) to print in pencil!
Spinning the lead would make print quality darker and more uniform.
The print format could be dot-matrix
(where a series of dots form the image). Or, for text-only applications, perhaps each letter could be formed as a continuous path... like writing by hand!
Oh, yeah, and.. its erasable!
textwriter
TextWriter
shameless self-promotion, not altogether unrelated [iron_horse, Mar 29 2007]
Caran D'ache Pencils
http://www.artdisco...rtist_Quality_.html
... um we appear to be running low on cadmium red deep [xenzag, Mar 29 2007]
Origin of Caran d'Ache
http://en.wikipedia...g/wiki/Caran_d'Ache
The French political cartoonist, born in Russia, took his name from the Russian word for pencil ("kara dash" is "black stone" in Turkic). The pencil company was later named after the political cartoonist. [DrCurry, Mar 29 2007, last modified May 05 2008]
Cartoonist
http://www.flickr.c...ntindale/150821670/
[Ian Tindale, Mar 29 2007]
[link]
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Nice. I'm not sure whether it would be better to have the pencil leads used directly on the paper (as you suggest) or to have a little crusher built into the printer to produce powdered graphite which would then be blasted at high speed onto the paper (perhaps through some electrostatic process - can powdered graphite be made to carry a charge?). |
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[hippo] that's basically how a laser printer
works. Except that instead of graphite, it
uses toner (an ionised mix of carbon
powder and polymer). I think graphite is
pretty stable in its molecular structure, so
it would be hard to apply the same
process. |
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Could actually be wonderful if it had
hundreds of Caran D'ache colouring
pencils all lined up to make drawings +
(see link) |
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//if it had hundreds of Caran D'ache //
[aside] The Russian for "pencil" is pronounced "carandash ", and I wondered if anyone could tell me if this is one of those examples of a brand name becoming to generic name (like "biro" or "hoover"). My Russian teacher couldn't tell me.
IIRC, Caran d'Ache is a Swiss company. |
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I always thought Caran D'ache meant a
quick way to draw an automobile, but I
suppose that's a form of Russian too.
(groans but refuses to apologise) |
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OK, it is similar to a pencil plotter. However, spinning the lead allows raster graphics as well as vector graphics. Maybe using the same leads as mechanical pencils is novel as well? And I had in mind a smaller size than the typical plotter |
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AWL: the other way round, actually - see link. |
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That's interesting - one of my tutors at art college in the early 80s, also a cartoonist, took his name from the British word for pencil. |
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Whenever I have a great idea to post, HB's search feature seldom fails to save me the effort. [+] |
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