You know that new inkjet printer you just bought? Its about to look pretty prehistoric in comparison to what we have discovered.

A team of researchers in Singapore has managed to construct a nano printer that is capable of producing detailed images on a surface only 50 micrometers across. For those of you who are not great with conversions, that is about the width of a single human hair.

The Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (ASTAR), the company responsible for the project, claims that the printer can reproduce an image at an astonishing resolution of 100,000 dots per inch. In comparison, most magazines are printed at an average resolution of 300 dots per inch. Each dot it prints is actually made of four pillars of “nano-particles”, each tipped with silver and gold “nano-disks”. The distance between these dots is actually what determines the color produced. This alters the way light is refracted which can produce various colors without having to use pigments like traditional printers that we currently use today.

According to ASTAR, they have reached the maximum resolution that can be discerned by the human eye. Anything beyond this resolution would simply result in a ‘smudgy’ image that our brain and eyes together would not be able to recognize.

It is safe to assume that we won’t be seeing such printing technology on the selves of our local Best Buy anytime soon. Presumably, such technology would be very costly to manufacture and would rule out the chance of having one at home. For that matter, who has the need to create such high-resolution prints on a regular basis?