Glorious technicolor digital pen writes in every shade under the sun

06-12-2014 • http://www.dvice.com, Addy Dugdale

No, this is not the start of a children's book, but a digital color-picker pen that can give you an exact match of the hue you want in either ink, or digitally, onto the screen of a tablet. Scribble works using a color sensor which identifies the intensity of yellow, say, that you want when you hold the pen up to a banana. Its built-in microprocessor then mixes the inks to the correct shade for you to draw in.

There will be two versions of the tool — one is a pen, which resembles a CMYK version of one of these, with a chamber containing the printer ink cartridges, which are mixed together to produce the shade you want. The second one is a stylus which works via Bluetooth, connecting to your cellphone or tablet via an app and displaying the color you chose on the screen. It's a cool toy — and my money's on the stylus being the more popular version. Why? Three words for you: printer; ink; cartridges. Both pens will come with 1GB of storage, enough to store up to 100,000 colors.