London National Gallery exhibited life-size reproductions of Constable and Da Vinci on the streets of the city. The task of paintings reproduction was performed by Electronic Printing Services in Leeds. They say they were looking for a printing device that would make billions of pixel at high resolution.

Steve Farley, Managing Director at Electronic Printing Services says:

“We had the money to invest but there wasn’t really anything to invest in until we found HP. The image is 2.5m wide by 64m long. You don’t get any degradation of image.”

The printer found was HP DesignJet 10000. All reproductions were printed on a special vinyl media, which combined with waterproof laminating provides three years of fade resistance.

The largest painting cost around $400 to print, however that was still cost effective.

All HP toner cartridges are avaible at Toner Cartridge Depot webstore

Konica Minolta introduces bizhub C451, a next model in a series of next-generation bizhub products. This multifunction machine combines printer, copier, fax, and scanner, and provides a networked solution for high-end office workgroups and applications.

Bizhub C451 features such Konica Minolta’s technologies as Emperon Print Controller, Simitri HD (High Definition) Color Polymerized Toner, and Biometric Authentication Unit, which scans, encrypts, stores the vein patterns of a finger and then uses them to distinguish individuals.

The multifunction has a proprietary ‘360 degree design’ that makes the machine look nice from any angle of view. Remarkable part of new printer exterior is a large 8,5-inch color LCD. Also, Konica Minolta Bizhub C451 offers fast color output of 45 pages per minute; Standard Automatic Duplex Unit for double-sided printing and copying, and four paper drawers making up 3,650-sheet capacity.

Other features include:

• Exceptionally fast warm up and fast first copy time
• Tandem laser print head with polygon mirror
• Internet Fax and desktop faxing
• Lower temperature fusing, ultra-fine carrier particles and higher purity materials, and
• many more.

Whether we want it or not, technological advancements change our life, and we often forecast how upcoming discoveries would affect it. Just like voice recognition would make typing obsolete or a digital workplace would eliminate the need for paper.

The rumors of totally paperless office future have been around for quite a long time, however, it doesn’t seem like such thing is coming any soon. In its “Future of Printing Survey”, OKI Printing Solutions interviewed 700 IT professionals nationwide, and discovered that they expect printing same amount or even more in the future, because they find it an important part of their job.

Here are the highlights of the survey:

90% of respondents consider their business printer to be indispensable or important, while only 1% consider their business printer to be not at all important

78% of respondents expect to print about the same amount or more often in the future as they do today

78% of respondents still prefer to review printed documents, whether in combination with reviewing on-screen or alone

Hard copy of a document is still considered something more trustful compared to electronic file read from the screen.

If you are a photo enthusiast or pro photographer, if color-accurate prints and expanded gray tonal range of a print make you value it, then Epson Stylus Photo R2400 is just for you.

Printer come along with numerous paper-handling options: roll paper feeder, matte paper input, and paper-input support for feeding single sheets of heavy stock. Add this to default ejecting, flipping and swinging out trays, holders and feeders, and you’ll be able to virtually any kind of paper. Of course, not all paper-handling options can be attached simultaneously. Besides, in the box you can find a FireWire cable and a CD with printer drivers and Epson software.

Epson Stylus Photo R2400 has resolution of 5,760×1,440dpi and uses 8-color UltraChromeK3 ink set – standard CMYK colors plus light cyan and magenta, and light black and matte black inks. Color cartridges have yield of 450 pages, while black and gray cartridges have capacity of 520 pages.

The printer has average speed of printing, it takes 1 minute, 34 seconds to produce a 6×10 print in Photo mode, 4 minutes in Best Photo mode.