Hardware Idea - Portable Laptop Printer

When I was in college, I was always paranoid about getting my term papers printed well before the due date. Many professors had a zero tolerance late policy so if your paper wasn't in her hand by 8:00am, you got a failing grade - NO EXCEPTIONS. Because my luck had a tendency to gravitate to the bad end, I always took precautions and made sure my work was printed a full 24 hours before the deadline. I always wished there was an easier way though.

I found the following diagram in a pictures folder on my external hard drive a few days ago. I apparently made this in my sophomore year of college, no doubt during a particularly boring class. I figured it belonged on this blog:

Sorry for the quality of the upload.

It's a little hard to see but the printer is a very flat, approximately laptop dimensioned printer that you could take with you alongside the laptop. I'm not exactly sure if technology has reached the point where this is practical yet, but basically the whole top would be a large black and white ink cartridge. under that would be a small stepper motor type thing for applying the ink. The whole thing would be powered by a rechargable battery which is capable of printing X number of pages between each charge. It would have the typical USB printer connection as well as a mini / micro USB cable port for connectivity. I didn't include it at the time but it might be a better idea at this point and time to include WI-FI printing / Cloud printing.

The right side of the device would have a small LCD display for messages (mainly errors). There would also be a cancel button, a resume button, and a power button.

Printing would occur in a similar fashion to a fax machine. blan paper would go in the front and be spit out the back as the completed document. Simple as that.

This would be a great product for the business person on the go. Sometimes you have last minute documents to print and are nowhere near a public printing location. This printer would be small enough and lightweight enough that you could just throw it in your laptop bag and go about your daily life. It would also be great in an office setting. It's small enough that it could be placed below a monitor on a desk and forgotten about. This is especially great for all in one type computers (iMac, HP TouchSmart, etc).

Office Example

So again, this idea depends entirely on battery technology as well as printer mechanics technology. I think it's a possibility in the near future though. I've seen some portable 3D printers, and this only needs 2 dimensions.

Only time will tell