Microsoft's top scientist thinks that healthcare of the future might include the ability to print your own medicines at home. Clearly, no such machinery exists, but if Microsoft puts its weight behind such a venture, who knows? It would certainly change the dynamic of the healthcare system. PC World has more of the interview with Craig Mundie, the company's chief research and strategy officer.

The Dell 968 All-in-One Printer offers built-in wireless connectivity, which is a wonderful feature for anyone with a home office, a small network of computers, or just plain ol' limited office space. It won't take the place of a dedicated photo printer, and it's not quite as fast as I would like it to be, but these are minor quibbles. For the price, this printer does a great job.

Photo © Dell

If you run a small business, you inevitably spend a great deal of your time in the post office. Pitney Bowes, a manufacturer of corporate mailroom equipment, has a way to make mass-mailings easier as well as more noticeable. Its StampExpressions printing kit allows you to design custom stamps with (almost) any image you like on it, and then print out the image and stamp to personalize mass mailings, brochures, or whatever else your business mails out. The printer costs $159.99 and comes with a 5-lb scale and a label roll. There is no fee and no commitment to use StampExpressions, and it could be a great way to get customers to pay attention to your mail.

Even if you don't run a business, you can have fun with printing your own stamps--or, rather, letting Pitney Bowes print them for you. With StampsExpression Personal Postage, you upload whatever image you want to appear on your stamps, and they do the rest. It's a fun way to send out those Mother's Day cards!

If you think that laser printers eat up too much space, you may be in for a surprise. South Korean manufacturer Samsung has released two new color laser printers. The CLP-315K has 2,400x600 dpi prints while the CLX-317FNK adds a scanner (and can save directly to a USB token); both printers take up about as much desktop space as an all-in-one printer. The two models are not yet available in the U.S., but when they are, I'll test them out and put them through their paces. In the meantime, it's good to hear that laser printers are shrinking, since their size has been one of their big drawbacks till now.

More on the new Samsung laser printers is at Akihabara News.

The Canon Pixma MP610 is a nicely designed all-in-one (it lacks a fax and an automatic document feeder, however) that does a great job at scanning and printing photos. I found it a little frustrating to use at times, since its handy LCD screen doesn't do a good job at previewing photo edits. I also wish the Pixma came with better graphics software. Read a full review of the Pixma MP610 all-in-one printer for more about its pros and cons.

Photo © Canon

When I was a kid (okay, recently too), I loved using lemon juice to write secret notes in disappearing ink. New research being done by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a Xerox research facility, has found a way to make disappearing ink for printers, too. Documents printed on its reusable paper can be erased and written over by printers using a new ultraviolet light technology. Recycling made easy! While the technology won't be commercially available for a few more years, it's not going to be exorbitantly priced, and it will actually help you save money because you'll use less paper, and because it takes less energy to print a document using this technology than current printer technologies (and far less energy than recycling). Win-win!

Read more on this amazing new technology on the Green Tech Blog.

In honor of Earth Day, this week’s blog postings will help point you toward some Earth-friendly news and some greener ways of using your printer. Canon, which makes the popular all-in-one Pixma printers, announced that from May through August it will plant one tree for every 10 new Canon Generation Green products registered (these include many scanners as well as Pixma printers). So make sure you register your Canon purchase!

You can save paper (and money) by duplex printing (printing on both sides of the page) as well as by reducing the size of prints and putting multiple pages on one sheet. That’s particularly useful for big jobs such as printing out black-and-white versions of a PowerPoint presentation for your reference. Printing multiple pages on one side is easy to do, as you’ll see in this Step-by-Step guide.

If you think that printer companies are only interested in getting you to use lots of ink so you have to buy more, you'll be interested to know that HP has released A Guide to Greener Printing, a handy overview of techniques that will help you save paper, energy, and, yes, even ink. Some ideas are fairly obvious (print on both sides of the paper when you can), but others are new. For example, you can print up to four pages on one side of a sheet if it's just for draft printing, which will save you a ton of paper. And HP offers SmartWeb Printing, free software that "lets you select, store and organize text and graphics from multiple web pages and then edit and print exactly what you see onscreen." I'm looking forward to testing SmartWeb Printing, since it seems that I waste a lot of pages and ink on trying to print what I need from the Web. Let me know what you think!

If you've got a quilter in the family and an inkjet printer in the house, you've got a wonderful opportunity for a unique present. Sew-on fabric sheets let you print anything, from your baby pictures to your favorite holiday snapshots, onto washable, durable fabric. Simply print, peel off the backing, and you've got a sewable, quiltable, wonderful gift for your favorite quilter!

Everything you need to know about printing on fabric is in this How-To guide.

Don't have an inkjet printer yet? That's no excuse! Take a look at reviews of some great inkjet printers.

The Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner does a great job a digitizing photos, and it comes with a great software bundle that includes Adobe Photoshop Elements. The scanner can handle negatives and slides as well as prints, and with a single button can save to a PDF or send via e-mail. What else could you ask for? Well, some better documentation, perhaps. And an automatic document feeder. Read the full review of the Epson V500 Photo Scanner to see if it's what you've been looking for.

Photo © Epson