Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s a hand-held printer that silently and beautifully prints material it has stored on an array of different surfaces and paper sizes that would otherwise be very difficult on which to print.

The Story: Though it might seem older than it is, desktop printing is only about 30 years old, coming into its own with the rise of desktop PCs. The way printers are made is based on that same, in technological terms, ancient technology. Simply put, it’s inefficient. If you wanted something printed, you’d have to go to a printer, or perhaps bring along a “portable” printer. Beyond that, the components that make up desktop printers, at best, have an awful lot of moving and electro-mechanical parts. But all that’s changed. Introducing PrintBrush from PrintDreams. It’s a hand-held printer that you wave like a wand over a variety of different surfaces, and it silently outputs your printed material. Imagine needing a printout for a meeting without ever having to get up to excuse yourself, or printing information in a notebook or on a package. It’s effortless, efficient and amazing.

The sum of its parts

If you were to look at an ordinary desktop printer, you’d find, on average, it weighs 3600 grams. Printers based on PrintDreams technology weigh less than 350 grams. With roughly over 100 million printers shipped around the world every year, the potential raw materials savings alone reach well over 325,000 tons. For the record, a modern luxury cruise ship possesses about 80 thousand tons of raw materials. The savings would allow for more than four of these ocean liners to be built and set sail.

Additional information (from manufacturer)

The PrintBrush will be by far the smallest printer device in the world that can print full size formats (A4 or letter size). It is now possible to print directly in notebooks or other media that would never fit into a conventional printer device. It will also be completely silent allowing you to print during meetings, classes, in libraries, etc.  No wires, no cables, no mess!

Specs