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Preethi J

Swedish company Print Dreams has designed a printer that can fit in your bag.

It is the missing link of the mobile office — a hand-held printer. Soon to be available in the country, the Design Runner is a printer that fits in your palm.

This battery-run device allows users to print text on various surfaces — cardboard, plastics, tablecloth. With 600 dpi resolution, this printer also offers flexibility in font types and sizes.

It relies on a proprietary `font card' (a multimedia memory card MMC) specially designed for it. It weighs 400 gm and can be carried in a purse or bag.

The Swedish firm that has designed this gadget, Print Dreams, created it for hobby groups and for amateur photographers to organise their photo albums.

But its applications are numerous. Business travellers could use it to print out their e-tickets on-the-go, saving significant time and effort.

It could be used as a labelling machine, and to print out postal stamps.

The printer has been out in the US and European markets since January and is priced at $159. The company is looking for distributors in India and Asia.

The company plans to price the device low, and then use the `iPod effect' — accessories for the printer will make it a hot product in the market, says Alex Brunton, Chairman and CEO of Print Dreams.

One such accessory is the keyboard, conceptualised and designed by the Bangalore-based Vee Technologies. The user can type up to four lines of text, and also alter the fonts, font sizes using the keyboard. Vee employs 700 people and is a $12-million firm.

Panasonic attempted to design a hand-held printer — the SVP10, which did succeed in bringing `anytime' printing, but has the disadvantage of only being able to print on special paper. Also, the resolution of the printer is low at 290 dpi.

Another device designed by Print Dreams called PrintBrush can print an entire A4 size document at one go.

With a resolution of 600 dpi, this hand-held printer will soon be available for less than Rs 10,000 in India. Laser printers cost Rs 8,000 today. PrintBrush will be launched in the beginning of 2008. It offers Bluetooth connectivity, and a USB slot so you could connect the printer to your laptop/PDA (personal digital assistant).

What makes it tiny

The printer is made up of a single PCB (printed circuit board) and two sensors — there are no mechanical parts one associates with a printer. Using Print Dreams' patented Random Movement printing technology, an entire desktop printer (with over 300 mechanical parts) was fitted onto a single PCB.

The Swedish firm has 20 patents in this domain and has spent over $9 million on the technology. The company expects to sell one lakh units this year. The ink cartridge used in the printer is a specially designed one called `Low yield ink cartridge' by Lexmark, and costs $39. However, this price is expected to drop in the coming months as technology progresses. Print Dreams aspires to make the total cost of ownership of its hand-held printer drop down to $10.

Colour of the future

The future of the hand-held printer is colour. Print Dreams also expects convergence to hit the printing industry with a single device that shoots, scans, and prints — all with a button press. The digicam printer, called Draft photo printer, will be like the old, popular Polaroid machine, with better results.

And by the end of the decade, we can expect our mobiles to have print functionality in them too! In 2009, Print Dreams will introduce a `printer on a chip'. One can imagine the infinite uses of such a toy — click a snap on your camera phone and print immediately, or print out a PDF or ebook while travelling.

And with the patented Hard-Copy Mobile System technology, data that needs to be printed out can be sent to the mobile via a cellular network. So you need not have Internet connectivity and can send print files across to your friends.

The vision of Print Dreams is to be able to deliver A4 - printing - scanning - copying capability for less than 10 $ per year.

The company also has plans to size down a large format printer to look like a vacuum cleaner, says Brunton. These printers will be complementary to those in existence, he adds.

preethij@thehindu.co.in

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