Epson has announced that its wide-format inkjet printers Series Stylus Pro 7900 and 9900 reached 98% coverage of the Pantone Matching System. In turn, the company Pantone LLC confirmed that the achievement award of the certificate of conformity for Epson.

Pantone is an international reference system for selecting, identifying, combining and control of color in variuos application ares , including printing . With the ability to achieve 98% coverage of Pantone Colors professionals who use printers Epson now have complete freedom in creating designs, color proofing and commercial printing. Ability to tightly control the color allows, for example, exactly reproduce the corporate colors and a wide spectrum of Pantone colors to create eye-catching advertising, art and photo prints.

The combination of Epson Micro Piezo TFP and 10-color set of inks Epson UltraChrome HDR (High Dynamic Range) provides the results needed for graphic designers and professional printing. In addition to cyan, light cyan, vivid magenta, vivid light magenta, yellow, black, gray and light gray inks, Epson UltraChrome HDR inks include orange and green colors, to achieve the accuracy of hues, especially in the spectra from green to yellow and from yellow to red.

Those craftsmen making real working things out of Lego bricks just don’t stop. Recently, the collection of unusual gadgets has been supplemented by two new models.

The first sample is a circular saw, which case is made of plastic part of the well-known construction kit, while the disc is real with edge blunted for the safety reasons. Upon touching the disk, the rotation of the stops instantly. The authors of this masterpiece, well-known among with Lego fans, are Dave and John Xandegar from briXwerX Studio. On their personal page you can find many other interesting ideas.

Circular saw is good, but what’s the use of the device, if it does saw anyway? Much more interesting is another member of things-made-of-Lego family. It took whole three weeks (the assembly was conducted in the evenings after work), a large number of blocks design, four motors, sensors and prototyping board with a USB-interface for someone nicknamed squirrelfantasy to create this device. You can learn what this enthusiast has made, by looking the video below.

It is known from technical characteristics that the driver for the printer was written by the author, and the printing resolution, in his own words, is about 75 dots per inch. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to find out which markers are compatible with the printer, and which aren’t.

HP has released a new line of printers with a function of wireless printing directly from mobile phones and tablet PCs. It is noted that the new series is designed to work in the WWW, and each device is assigned a unique e-mail address enabling the printing from any place that has an Internet connection.

For example, you can print document from the iPad, BlackBerry smartphone or online service (say, Google Docs) in the form of an e-mail. And, you do not need to install drivers or make some other moves with your applications.

In addition, a special support site ePrintCenter is designed to help at least 40 companies, including Crayola and Nickelodeon, develop their own projects to take full advantage of the benefits of the new printers. These advantages include an option of reformatting the pages and optimizing of certain materials printing.

At the same time, by the end of this year HP plans to open up to seven thousand public terminals to allow printing directly on the spot. In addition, new HP printers, as already mentioned, are equipped with Internet access services and mostly multi-touch user interface, and their retail price should be between $99 and $399.

Ability to obtain three-dimensional objects using the printing device is no longer something exotic. In particular, this technology is used in the design and manufacture of prototypes and casting models. However, for the mass market the technology is virtually inaccessible because of the high cost of three-dimensional printers and consumables, although prices have been declining.

A kind of solution would be to issue individual components and kits for assembling the printer, but this approach may not satisfy all consumers. By the way, according to some projections, by 2011, prices for 3D-printers should be reduced to $1000. Maybe it’s the crisis, but so far no signs of such a decline are visible.

To some extent, the situation is being changed by the products of Purple Platypus. According to the company, the BFB 3000 Panther model is the first color, three dimensional printer costing less than $4000, shipped fully assembled.

Printign area of the BFB 3000 Panther is describes the volume of 320 x 300 x 200 mm (with a single print head). Dimensions of the printer are 580 x 520 x 520 mm, weight is 31 kg. Maximum print speed is up to 15 mm³/sec. Power consumption does not exceed 90 Watt. Interestingly, the BFB 3000 Panther does not require connection to a computer — it can be used autonomously by loading the task from an SD card.

The manufacturer of the device is a British company Bits from Bytes Ltd. Among the potential customers are printer manufacturing companies, industrial designers and architects, and just amateurs modelists.