HP Playing With Colour Day

We were recently invited to the Museum of Childhood for a HP Playing With Colour Day. HP joined forces with the Museum of Childhood in East London to put on a day of activities that could potentially take place in any home around the UK. Each activity was designed to tell the story of HP printers to show how incredible the printing process is and how the hours of research and development undertaken by HP into their paper and inks pays off.

We had lots of fun and I learnt a lot! This is what we did and why:

Shooting Gallery

Each ink takes between three to five years and more than 1,000 prototype formulations to perfect. With more than 100 new inks developed by HP’s engineers and scientists over the past 20 years, millions of dollars of investment ensure the very best technology is available to fit inside your printer. The inkjet head is the key element in any inkjet device, delivering minute droplets-on-demand to precise locations on the page.

During the printing process an Original HP ink cartridge ejects more than 36,000 drops of ink every second at speeds of up to 30mph.

By asking us to throw a small coloured ball through increasingly difficult targets they wanted us to understand the accuracy that an ink cartridge must have when printing. If scaled up the challenge facing an ink cartridge is the same as dropping a grape from a 30 storey building onto a moving pavement.

BG had lots of fun on this and we were there for quite a bit, she got quite good at it.

Cress Heads

HP’s Premium plus photo paper is designed with a porous coating technology. That means the ink is pulled into microscopic pores on the paper. This delivers instant dry photos but also water resistance to your prints.  

The faces of the cress head are made of this so we don’t have to worry about getting water on them.

Magic Moments

An inkjet printer is so reliable and easy to use yet we all take it for granted. However lift the lid and underneath you will find an array of cutting-edge engineering and chemistry innovations. Each inkjet nozzle can deliver drops of ink so minute that 4 billion drops can fit into a single teaspoon.

They had a magician that BG was enthralled by and we had to go back 4 times to see him and I was his glamorous *ahem* assistant for one trick.

Summer Holiday

As important as the Original HP Ink is the HP paper you print on. Photos printed with Original HP inks on HP paper can last up to 4 generations. When taking and printing your photos from your summer holiday, whether to put in photo frames or for scrap books, consider that you want these memories to last many years.

This was so much fun BG dressed up and had pictures taken with a beach scene behind, she had 3 photos taken.

Colour Match

Knowing what different shades and colours you can create with four standard colours is a fun and educational activity. There are in fact 72 million colour combinations possible from four standard colours that are used in HP inks, cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

For this the children mixed their own paint colours and made hand prints on a big board.

We had a great day and learnt a lot about HP, thank you.

*Travel and food costs was covered so we could attend.