HP's Brobdingnagian printer

My colleague and fellow Dialogue Box presenter Rupert Goodwins draws my attention to a product we really must take a look at — if we can get it into the building.

Observe the HP Scitex TJ8300 printer pictured below. Looks like a regular desktop inkjet does it not?

However, when we superimpose a pair of normal (or relatively normal) people, it's clear that this is, in fact, no ordinary inkjet. The thing is 2 metres tall, and handles media up to 1.65m by 3.7m in size.

Large-format printers for billboards and other kinds of signage are nothing new, of course, but what's brilliant about the HP Scitex TJ8x00 series is how it looks just like a standard desktop inkjet — only much, much bigger. The display on the right-hand end of the picture above isn't a little preview screen, it's a proper desktop monitor! The ink tanks (it's a 6-colour piezoelectric inkjet) must be the size of dustbins...

Back in May, HP plastered Cannes with enormous Scitex-printed posters during the Film Festival. You can see one here: