Babbage | Hacking

How not to print from an iPad

A clever idea to generate hard copy from an iPad: photocopy its screen. But does it work?

By T.S. | LONDON

The iPad can do many things, but supporting printers directly is not one of them. As Andrew Sullivan notes: "There's not an App for that." Form, a design company, suggests a simple if inelegant solution (in other words, a hack): stick the iPad on a photocopier and press copy. Presto! A hard copy of whatever is on its screen. But does it work?

A couple of us in the London office decided to give it a try. It doesn't. We used a rigorous sample of two photocopiers in the research department. One produced a solid black page; the other produced barely legible black text on a very dark grey background, even with the photocopier set to its lightest possible setting. This is because LCD screens are not designed to work this way. The light is meant to come from the back (the backlight), not the front. Other display technologies, such as the transflexive Pixel Qi screen found on the OLPC $100 laptop, might photocopy better, but might also be incompatible with the iPad's touch-screen.

So what can iPad owners do? There are a few apps that support printing, though none seems to be ideal. You can e-mail stuff (including a screen-grab) to a PC or Mac and print from that. Or you can simply try to do without printing.

This is all very silly, but it does raise a wider point. The iPad can't print directly (yet) and it doesn't work out of the box until it's been docked with a PC or Mac running iTunes. It is, despite all its cleverness, still a companion device for a "proper" computer. If Apple wants the iPad and its successors to be taken seriously as alternatives to existing desktops and laptops, rather than occasional adjuncts, then those things will have to change.

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