With regular felt pens, users are limited to the colors of the pens in a set. As you might have guessed, though, the Colorpik Pen is different – it can reproduce 16 million colors, which are scanned from the user's environment.
Currently the subject of a Kickstarter campaign, the Colorpik incorporates an RGB color sensor along with four refillable ink cartridges in different base colors.
The user simply holds the sensor up against the color to be copied (which could be on a flower petal, car, jacket or pretty much anything else), then presses a button to perform the scan. A pump within the pen subsequently mixes the inks together in order to reproduce that color.
The Colorpik comes with six different nibs (ballpoint, marker, brush, fountain, round and "needle") which can be swapped in and out as desired. It can also communicate with a dedicated iOS/Android app on a tablet via Bluetooth – or with a computer via USB – allowing the user to incorporate the scanned colors into their digital projects. A capacitive cap on the pen lets it be utilized as a stylus.
The app allows the user to tweak the hue, shade and tint of scanned colors, in order to get exactly what they want. And if the user wishes to draw in a certain color without having to hunt it down in their surroundings, they can just scan it from an included flip chart of 199 different colors.
One charge of the Colorpik's 280-mAh lithium battery is claimed to be good for approximately 15 hours of use, with one fill of each cartridge reportedly allowing for 15 miles (24 km) of drawing – which is an interesting way of measuring it.
Assuming the Colorpik Pen reaches production, a pledge of US$149 will get you a package that includes a pen, four nibs, a color chart and three sets of ink cartridges – the planned retail price is $298. You can see the pen in action, in the video below.
And if you think the whole color-copying-pen thing sounds familiar … well, that's because it has been done before. Prospective Colorpik backers might want to check out the Scribble Ink pen, or register for updates on the yet-to-reach-production Artera pen.
Sources: Kickstarter, Colorpik
