Kodak unveils "3D printing" for new printers

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Posted on 17 Feb 2011 at 17:15, by Kat Orphanides

Kodak's new budget inkjet MFPs support stereoscopic 3D printing. The feature is built into the accompanying All-in-One (AiO) driver software and is also available to owners of older Kodak printers who download the update.

The principle is simple: you take two ordinary photos, slightly offset from one another, and Kodak's software can merge these together and print them as a single red/blue 3D image, viewable through glasses with correctly coloured lenses. While this might not be as practical as what we think of as 3D printing - i.e. printers capable of creating 3D images by laying down thin layers of wax or plastic - it's still a first for home inkjets.

Kodak's new budget inkjet MFPs, the £70 ESP C110 and £80 WiFi enabled C310, don't have as many ink colours as the rest of Kodak's range, such as the ESP 7250. They'll cost less to buy, but use composite black for photo printing, as well as different ink cartridges with slightly lower yields: 350 pages from a £7 black cartridge and 400-odd pages per colour cartridge. We'll be reviewing the C110 soon.