Swiss university ETH Zurich’s nanotechnologists have just set a record for the world’s tinniest inkjet-printed color picture. The image of clownfishes loitering around a sea anemone, at nearly 80-by-115 micrometers, would easily fit on a cross-section of a human hair.

However, researchers haven’t used ordinary ink. The picture has been printed with ‘quantum dots’, small particles that emit light of various colors on the basis of their size. Tiny dots are blue, bigger ones are red, and the ones in-between are green or some blended shade. Every dot is at a distance of just 500 nanometers from its neighbors that give the picture a printed resolution of 25,000 dots per inch.

Guinness was there for record verification. Though a picture that can’t be seen by anybody without using a microscope has no use, other applications can be imagined for this kind of a precise printing method.

A picture’s inkjet rendering has become the smallest printed image ever made, necessitating a pretty high-tech microscope usage to even view it. As per researchers from ETH Zurich and its partner on the project, the start-up Scrona in Switzerland, the printed image has the size of the thickness of a piece of paper.

The picture of some tropical fish has been produced using quantum dot technology, which is also presently being used for luxury HD television sets. The BBC reported that the real life fish shown in the image are 3,333 times bigger than the size of the ones in the 0.08 mm by 0.115 mm (0.003 in by 0.005 in) picture.