Singapore-based researchers from the Singapore government’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)—led by materials scientist Joel Yang—have printed the highest-possible resolution image of 100,000 DPI (dots per inch) in full-color.
The devised-printing method uses four tiny pillars to manipulate light at the smallest scale—by altering the spaces between them to control what color they reflect—in order to achieve the highest-resolution image that the laws of physics allow.
To demonstrate the method, the researchers printed a 50x50-micrometer version (image seen above) of ‘Lenna’ or ‘Lena’, a commonly used a printing test image.
According to Teri Odom, an Illinois-based chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, if the image were made over areas large enough to see with the naked eye, “they would look higher than high definition”, she told Scientific American.
However, people with perfect vision can’t discern objects smaller than 20-30 micrometers.
[via A*STAR and Scientific American]