the future is now : color picker pen

Posted: January 21st, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: design, things | 9 Comments »

I saw this a while back and don’t know why I didn’t blog about it then — it’s a miraculous pen product, perfect for Paper Tastebuds! Well, thanks to Toxel, who reminded me of this invention, a creation by Korean designer, Jinsu Park. It is a pen inspired by the eyedropper tool in Adobe Photoshop, but you can select colors from real life and not just a digital image. There is an RGB sensor in the pen’s tip and a complimentary RGB cartridge that replicates the color you’ve scanned onto the paper you draw on. For real?!

(Images via DesignBoom)

9 Comments on “the future is now : color picker pen”

  1. 1 Thao said at 8:49 am on January 21st, 2010:

    This is way cool. Cooler than I can process right now. I MUST learn more.

  2. 2 Jeff said at 2:26 pm on January 21st, 2010:

    So awesome! Unfortunately it’s just a concept piece for the moment…

  3. 3 Tara said at 8:02 pm on January 21st, 2010:

    WHAAAAT?!!! I don’t even have an iPhone. I can’t handle the future! :(

  4. 4 Laurence said at 5:20 am on January 23rd, 2010:

    No, not for real. There’s no such thing as “RGB ink”.

  5. 5 Sunny said at 11:08 pm on January 25th, 2010:

    It never said RGB ink….but it did say RGB ink cartridge…I assume like the one in your printer.

    This is an amazing concept regardless!

  6. 6 Laurence said at 3:05 pm on January 26th, 2010:

    Sorry to be a wet blanket, but printers don’t have “RGB ink cartridges”. Print uses CMYK. RGB is for additive color (ie: light) and CMY is for subtractive color (eg: inks, paints, etc.).

    I agree that it’s a neat (though kind of obvious) concept, but that’s all it is: a concept. Everywhere I’ve seen this pen mentioned people seem to think that it’s real, but it isn’t. Basically someone thought “wouldn’t it be cool if a pen had a built-in color picker”, took a few photos pretending to use some mock-pens (made out of what appear to be red and green toothbrushes), made a cut-away 3D rendering showing the imaginary mechanism, and posted the result on the Internet.

  7. 7 Randa Katerina said at 10:24 pm on August 19th, 2011:

    I think the concept is fantastic, especially for interior designers- if the pen actually took the exact color and prints and for example the exact details of a venetian marble, then the designer would not have to carry around samples just this awesome pen- but it would have to be the exact precise colors – not like a camera – with a lot of memory space like a usb and maybe each time you scroll the name and color show of what you are searching for. Wow.. the ideas that are in my head are just flowing.. this pen concept could eventually be something great- but again it has to have something absolutely special in the technology department so that it’s nothing like taking a photo and actually purely realistic!

  8. 8 sunlitweb said at 6:18 pm on June 5th, 2012:

    The first schmuck to the drawing board is gonna make a mint off this. But engineering it is going to be a real beoch.

    You can’t use a pen like the one shown. There is too much ambient light coming into the tip of the pen. How can you pick color off of a fancy mirror frame? Too much topography to isolate a single, representational pixel. Hence the advantage of a flat, digital image.

    And how do you collect the information? You need a program to read the color and translate it to hexadecimal. Will that fit into a pen?

    I’ve already thought of a design idea for 2D and 3D objects. Whether it would work or not will remain pure speculation.

  9. 9 Weekend Links « Sarah Scussel, Graphic Designer said at 1:20 pm on October 13th, 2012:

    [...] This pen will match any color! [...]

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