technizzel

Whether you’re at a party, a wedding, a birthday, or just chilling with some friends on a Friday afternoon, a camera has always found itself at the scene as well. With our digital cameras, we forgo the limitations of the 24 film rolls and click away to albums with fifty or more photos. The onset of Facebook^® has only furthered this interest of capturing every moment at every event, as every picture is now shared with all your friends with teasing captions to highlight the emotions.

Now and then, though, there comes that arduous task of showing Grandma what you have been up to in those past months, and oddly enough she is not your Facebook^® friend and cannot see those embarrassing images of you at 2 AM in Cancun. Thus, you are left with the option of printing them out from your computer, slowly sucking the very ink that would fuel your term papers into a one-inch thick album of random innocuous pictures of you.

Imagine, now, an alternative that saves your ink, your time, and is fast and easy to use. Clearly that argument has won you over, and that is exactly what Zink^® claims with its product. Zink^® (Zero INK) is a fully-funded start-up company that grew from the Polaroid^® Company in 2005. Since then, the company has channeled its name throughout the country by sponsoring the ideals of promoting new technology, innovating ideas, and creating a future without ink. The key to Zink^®’s success, having birthed over twenty billion prints in the United States alone in 2007, is the unique paper.

This paper’s special technology enables for the images to print on surface without the messy hassle of wet ink or replacing empty ink cartridges. As zink.com explains, this paper is “an advanced composite material with dye crystals embedded inside and a protective polymer overcoat layer outside”. These crystals are colorless before printing, resembling regular white photo printing paper, however with the use of heat, Zink^®’s printer activates the crystals to render perfect digital images from your camera.

The most enticing aspect of this product is the size of the printer. In this day and age, where the smaller it is, the better it is, Zink^® printers can fit in the palm of your hand, in your pocket, become attached to your cell phone, or just mundanely sit on your desk. Anywhere, anytime you want a picture, just print!

While the paper is water-resistant, resists fading from exposure to light, heat and humidity, affordable, non-toxic and earth-friendly, as well as durable, Zink^® also provides even more incentives to buy its product. With high-resolution colors on paper not sensitive to light these pictures will never lose color with age. Regardless of the size of the picture, the speed is fast, the process is efficient, as there is nothing to throw away. No more ribbons, toner, or ink- it’s Zink^® time!

The future may be a little short of the Space Odyssey’s expectations, but that doesn’t deter Zink^® from experimenting with smaller printers, newer forms of paper, and other unfathomable printing phenomenons. At least at the moment, you can just zink Grandma images- less time, no ink. And that’s right- for the future, zink is the new print; it’s all about the future now.

Video Link: http://www.zink.com/discover/how_ZINK_works/

Every now and then, we will take a deeper look into some of our favorite gadgets in order to get a better understanding of how they work and the technology they involve.

To start, let’s examine the iPod craze. Besides their small size, light weight and aesthetic beauty, what is inside the iPod that makes everything click so well? More generally, what allows us to take these MP3 players anywhere and listen to thousands of songs, TV shows or movies in the palm of our hands, or in the iPod shuffle’s case, our fingertips?

To give you some perspective, consider burning a CD from your computer. On average, one CD holds about 15-16 songs, right? Think about that for a second…how can something less than half the size of a CD hold hundreds more songs? MP3 files enable the storage of musical information by squeezing the data into about one twelfth as much space. You can make MP3 files that are smaller or larger by compressing them by different amounts, but the more you compress them the worse they’ll sound.

Inside an MP3 file, music is stored as long strings of binary numbers (zeros and ones) in a series of chunks called frames. Each frame starts with a short header, including the track name, artist, genre, etc, almost like a table of contents. The music data is stored directly afterward. The reason MP3 players, namely iPod’s, have become so popular, is because they can store many many more MP3’s in a smaller space. A normal track from a CD requires about 60 Megabytes of storage space, compared to an average of 5 Megabytes per MP3 file.

An MP3 is just another type of computer file (jpeg, doc to name a few others). Therefore, the iPod, or any MP3 player is essentially a miniature computer. In fact, these handheld “computers” are more powerful than the early desktops from 20 years ago that would fill up an entire room!

All MP3 players have similar components under their pretty shells:

Most MP3 players have another output as well: a little display that tells you what’s playing. It basically just relays the information in the short header discussed earlier.

Next time you turn on your iPod, imagine what’s going on inside the gadget. As you scroll to your favorite song, the processor searches the hard-drive for the desired track, matching the short header. Next, it reads through the frames related to that specific MP3 file. It displays the artist and track name on the display, then begins to turn the digital information stored in each frame as ones and zeros back into sound frequencies that travel through your headphones. Music to your ears!