Colour printing reaches its ultimate resolution | Hacker News Reader

Colour printing reaches its ultimate resolution

nature.com

68 pointsananyob18 comments

Salient point: the diffraction limit, sets in when the distance between two objects is equal to half the wavelength of the light used for imaging. The wavelength in the middle of the colour spectrum is about 500 nanometres. That means the pixels in a printed image can’t be spaced any closer together than about 250 nanometres without looking smudged. Yang’s images pack the pixels at just this distance.

Hence, "ultimate resolution".

It's funny they still use the Lenna image for testing. It's from a Playboy centerfold in 1972[1].

[1]https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Lenna

Yeah I was thinking the same thing. Used that image myself for my undergrad thesis project on image compression. Didn't actually know who it was till a while later, it was just an image given to me to use.

This was my favorite part of the story http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/

I like the consistency/tradition, it's like the Hello World! of images.

It's amusing, but actually really useful. People in the field "know" what Lenna is supposed to look like, so can rapidly assess the qualities of a print/technique/filter.

Funny I used the same image for embedding a watermark some 8 years ago for a university assignment. Had no idea about its origins.

Beat that Retina :).... Just kidding... Retina is just fine for our poor human eyes.

But this is incredible nonetheless. Just Enhance!

The resolution might not be beneficial for electronic displays, but the this technology can achieve a wider range of colors than any RGB display could possibly achieve. It's probably far less precise with current technology, but directly controlling the wavelength of the reflected light gives you access to more colors than just mixing 3 fixed wavelengths.

Could we theoretically control the resonance of these nano-posts electronically, and use this technology as the basis for a next-generation reflective display?

Your poor video card... :-(

It's only, what, 450 times the density of a Retina MacBook... So you only need, what, a 200,000 times faster card? No sweat.

Why, can you resolve things 250 nanometers across?

Probably not, but I'd love to try.

It's 100,000 dpi, not 10k.

Thanks. Dumb error on my part.

The way the article (I know it's Nature, but still) talks about "highest possible" makes it sound dubious. Surely there is a printing scale below this at a molecular or atomic level (or even at the sub-atomic level). Saying this is the "highest possible" is terrible scientific reporting because we know of smaller scales we just don't necessarily know how to 'print' them yet.

It's an impressive achievement but I don't think it is the "ultimate".

From the article:

"Even under the best microscope, optical images have an ultimate resolution limit, and this method hits it. When two objects are too close together, light reflecting off them will diffract, and the two objects blur together. This effect, called the diffraction limit, sets in when the distance between two objects is equal to half the wavelength of the light used for imaging. The wavelength in the middle of the colour spectrum is about 500 nanometres. That means the pixels in a printed image can’t be spaced any closer together than about 250 nanometres without looking smudged. Yang’s images pack the pixels at just this distance."

It's amazing to me that we can manipulate individual particles. Even if I knew how it was done, it'd still be magical.

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