Oleksiy Pikalo seems to be getting bored with plain old coffee every morning, so he built a printer to put ornate designs on top of his daily cup of joe.

He bought a used Philips 8155 x-y flatbed plotter and modded it into a printer that shoots out edible ink. As a result, he can now decorate his coffee with detailed designs and could probably win a barista competition or two.

The only problem is that the coffee will probably get cold by the time printing is finished. Never mind though, because it’s completely worth it for the end result.

Check out a how-to here, and a video of the coffee printer in action after the jump. Read more »

Designer Hung Chih Wang has come up with what he thinks a portable printer should look like. His tiny device, called “Trak,” attaches to the back of a laptop screen to take up as little room as possible.

Trak is powered by USB, and comes complete with a detachable printer head for even more space savings when lugging the thing around.

Unfortunately, the concept has its downsides as well. You are probably already asking yourself if it’s even possible to fit a printer into such a small package, and we highly doubt it. The design also seems to be limited to laptops with the same width, although that could be easily fixed with some sort of extendable grips on the printer. The open nature of the design would probably lead to quick dirt and grime accumulation, causing poor-quality printouts.

Nevertheless, we applaud the designer for trying to tackle the problem of portable printers with such a stylish concept.

[Via yanko design]

Massachussetts company Konarka Technologies has developed a way to to manufacture solar cells using inkjet printing.

The company says that they have made the process of fabricating solar panels much easier and, more importantly, cheaper because they don’t require a clean room.

Inkjet printing will also allow them to produce solar cells with multiple colors and patterns. This could help them stand out less on the roof of a house, for example.

This development could lead to cost savings passed down to the consumer as well as new uses for solar power. We wonder, though, if Konarka will pull an HP and charge an arm and a leg for the ink cartridges for their printers.

Polaroid has announced their Zero Ink mini-printer device, meant for printing digital camera issues quickly on the fly via USB or Bluetooth. The printer uses no ink whatsoever, and prints out borderless 2×3 images with a sticky backing, so you can gleefully put them up on walls and anywhere else.

The Zero Ink technology, dubbed ZINK, uses heat to produce an image on special paper, which Polaroid describes as “an advanced composite material with embedded yellow, magenta and cyan dye crystals, activated with 200 million heat pulses, in 30 seconds, in a single pass…With 100 billion crystals in a 2×3in print, the paper is 100% inkless.”

The printer has a scheduled release date of June in the UK, but no mention of a US release date yet.