The smallest image ever printed

Scrona Ltd. and the ETH Zurich have achieved something great, they have been announced as the official World Record Holders for the smallest inkjet-printed colour image. ETH Zurich invented a special groundbreaking 3D NanoDrop printing technology, which is now commercialized by ETH Zurich spin-off company Scrona, to print this image.

The image measures a minuscule 0.0092 mm2 in area, or 80 µm x 115 µm. That’s the area covered by a single pixel of a retina display or about a cross-sectional area of a human hair. The printed image is so small that it is totally invisible to the naked eye. The official witnesses had to use a special microscope to the this tiny little picture.

The process used to create this image is called quantum-dots-nanoparticles. Light is emitted of a very specific color-to build up the image. The inkjet printing process lays down a series of red, green and blue quantum dot layers, at a resolution of 25,000 dots per inch. That means that each pixel sits just 500 nanometers from the next.

Considering that the image measures just 80 microns by 115 microns or the size of a single Retina display pixel, the picture of clown fish produced is surprisingly quite clear.