This Is the World’s Smallest Color Image Ever Printed

Normally when you take a great shot, you want to print it nice and large. Not the nanotechnologists at Swiss university ETH Zurich, though: They just set the record for smallest inkjet-printed color image in the world. At about 80-by-115 micrometers, the picture — of clownfishes loitering around a sea anemone — would comfortably fit on a cross-section of a human hair.

But the researchers didn’t use ordinary ink; this image is printed with “quantum dots,” tiny particles that emit light of different colors depending on their size. Smaller dots are blue, large ones are red, and those in-between are green or…

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