Slashdot Mirror
New Details on Xerox Inkless Printer
Iddo Genuth writes "Xerox is developing a new printing technology which does not require ink of any kind. The new technology includes reusable paper which can be printed and erased dozens of times and has the potential to revolutionize printing. New details on this upcoming technology, which was first reported in September 2006, are now revealed."
And it's slashdotted already. Bah
If you are the webmaster, your account may have exceeded for one or more of the following reasons:
* Your site has used more than 20% of the cpu.
* Your account has too many processes running at the same time.
* Your site was consuming too many resources. This happens on occassion to very busy sites that have inefficient scripts running.
* Your Host (eg. this one) is taking you for an idiot
There are very few stories on Slashdot (or, for that matter, anywhere), that actually make me say "wow", but this is definitely one. I work in an office where I have to use the printer a lot, but rarely for anything long term - printing a customer's emailed comments to show a manager who doesn't have our Kana email software in place etc. That's a tremendous waste of paper, as in most cases, the paper is crumpled up and in the (sometimes recycling, but usually not) bin within minutes of printing. If that paper was reusable to this extent, our paper usage would drop to a fraction of its current rate - saving us money and helping the environment in the process. You don't get much better than that :)
This same type of tech is being integrated into cameras, by a company called zink. It's just like the old polaroid days.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Heh. obviously this will never happen because kkkorperate amerikkka makes all of their profit$$$ from ink.
Doesn't need ink but it does cost $1 a sheet for the paper. Only half joking. If they keep the cost down to 2X or 3X the cost of standard paper it'd be extremely interesting. The problem has been they virtually give away printers then soak you for the ink. I find it hard to believe the printers would be a compriable price and the paper will be even cost to the price of even expensive paper. No more clogged ink jets would be a huge improvement on it's own. I've blown through $30 in ink trying to clear the a clogged ink cartridge.
An inkless printer will never be a viable profit-generating product unless it costs many, many thousands of dollars. Printer manufacturers make most of their money from consumables, and a printer which requires no consumables (even the paper is resuable) will never make it to market.
Wireless wire, cordless power strips.
How many of you have tried to conserve paper by manually duplexing on a low-end printer (at home say) and found that just flipping the page over carefully is enough to cause the paper to jam.
How are Xerox planning on coping with dog-earing, tearing, scuffing and otherwise deformed paper?
If there were an OPEN SOURCE type printer without all constricting licensing crap.
We could use cheap ink. It would be AMAZING. You could print out photographic posters for cents.
You could redecorate your house with your own designs or photos like wallpaper.
A lucrative idea out there. Just remember you heard it here.
Problem is the paper costs $45.95 per sheet quits working if it get's treated like a normal piece of paper.
I see Proud IT managers showing off this new tech and then screaming in pain as the Director of sales grabs it folds it in half and staples it.
If they get the cost of the paper to only 2x the cost of normal paper they may MAY have a chance. but right now laser printers and cheap copy paper is incredibly cheap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
here is the coral cache http://www.tfot.info.nyud.net:8090/content/view/11 5/58/
As if the $2000 per gallon of ink wasn't enough, now we'll have $300 sheets of paper...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Editors why did this get posted? There's not a single primary or even secondary link in that summary. Besides that, his blog is now slashdoted, so we can't even check to see if that has any primary sources. Note to the submitter, don't do this anymore. I don't mind people linking to their blogs in a passive way, but include some sources in your stories, please.
I seem to recall reading an article like this on Slashdot back in '42. Xerox patented this technology called "dry printing" (xeros graphos in Greek) that didn't use ink, but a material known as "toner".
(Yes, I do hate it when people refer to toner and ink interchangeably as "ink"; why do you ask?)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Xerox has developed so many amazing technologies which either never made it to market, or were brought to market by a myriad of other companies while the company has struggled for years to grow new business opportunities, and growth. This is very interesting, and this is definitely perking up interest. How often do we print something which we only need for a short time? I suspect 95% of what I print is transitory in nature.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/dn947 1
And how much is the reusable paper going to cost? It'd better close to the cost of ink + paper or else no one's going to buy it.
Xerox Inkless Printer
Written by Iddo Genuth Thursday, 15 February 2007
Xerox is developing a new printing technology which does not require ink of any kind. The new technology includes reusable paper which can be printed and erased dozens of times and has the potential to revolutionize printing. Although the technology is still in the early stages of development, it has the potential to cut printing costs and reduce office paper usage dramatically. New details on this upcoming technology are revealed here for the first time.
The dream of the paperless office
One of the earliest articles discussing the topic of the paperless office was "the Office of the Future" published in the June 1975 issue of Business Week. The idea, bandied about many times since, was the elimination of most or all paper which has been piling around in our offices in the last several decades.
The personal computer revolution of the 1980s brought with it the hope of the paperless office as there was a shift from the old-fashioned typewriters to viewing and editing documents on computer screens. But this dream vanished quickly as people realized that their monochromatic cathode ray tube (CRT) displays were uncomfortable to watch for long periods of time. Aggravating the problem was the introduction of the low-cost office printer, capable of making dozens of copies of each document (an ability which was limited until that time to large and expensive photocopying machines).
Book on an LCD-difficult to read Book on an LCD-difficult to read
As years passed by it seemed that the introduction of the personal computer not only did not reduce the amount of paper produced in our offices, it actually increased it.
The widespread adoption of liquid crystal display (LCD) technology in recent years made some people hopeful again for at least some reduction in office paper production, but although LCD might be somewhat more comfortable to watch than the older CRT screens, most people still find it difficult to read long documents on the computer screen; and in most cases anything above one or two pages will get printed at least once.
The old/new hope of electronic paper
In the 1970s, Xeroxs Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a powerhouse of innovation. Many aspects of what we now see as the modern computer, namely the mouse, the laser printer, the Ethernet, GUI, computer-generated color graphics, as well as a number of important computer languages, were invented at PARC around that time. The development of the Gyricon, which was nearly lost among all those important breakthroughs, was originally invented in 1974 by PARC employee Nicholas K. Sheridon as a new display technology for the company ALTO personal computer. Eventually, the Gyricon (a Greek term meaning rotating image) turned out to be the basis for modern e-paper technology.
Electronic paper (e-paper) is the name given to several distinctly different technologies (to be covered in depth by a forthcoming TFOT article) which are capable of displaying text, images and in the case of some e-paper technologies, video, on a thin (occasionally flexible) sheet of plastic. In many respects e-paper is more similar to a digital display than to paper. E-paper displays can change the image at a press of a button, store countless articles or books and can even be made interactive allowing a user to add content, search and perform other operations. The important advantage of e-paper over conventional screen technology is its readability. Unlike conventional screen technology, e-paper doesn't emit light on its own; rather, it uses the ambient light to reflect the text just like ordinary paper. E-paper has the potential to eliminate paper usage in future offices but it remains to be seen whether it will be successful where so many previous technologies have failed.
Commercial e-paper technology is finally starting to appear on the market but it will take seve
Arthur Anderson auditing firm and Enron would have loved this technology. Dont shred incriminating documents, just erase and reprint innocuous shipping vouchers on them and say, "Gee! we were just saving money, cutting down on printing costs, We would have never intentionally destroyed evidence wink wink"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Great, so now we will have to buy both ridiculously expensive ink and ridiculously expensive paper.
alternative to bubblejets.
I think this is a great idea. Except for the fact that I almost only print things out so I can write on them. If I didn't need to write on the paper, I probably would just read it from the screen. Occasionally I'll print out a map or a list to take with me, but then it gets put in my pocket and ultimately ends up torn, scrunched, and not so reusable.
So while I'm sure the Earth applauds this invention, I'm not quite sure for whom or understand what circumstances its useful. I also wonder how resusability is there. They claim 50 reprints, but I wonder if the image quality is as good by the 20th time as the first. Also, it apparently fades within a day.
It's not that I think the technology is useless, just limited.
Can be erased and re-written?
That would be pencil, then.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I'm wearing fabricless underwear
This is just the first step. The next version will use no ink and no paper. April Fool's day came early.
... feed the printer a whiteboard-type thing that you can write on and which can be erased easily. More durable than regular paper anyway.
The new technology includes reusable paper which can be printed and erased dozens of times and has the potential to revolutionize printing
I spent several hellish months working at an advertising company with a boatload of medium-sized digital copiers, some b&w, some color. All were made by Xerox. Guess what they were doing, almost constantly? Jamming. Xerox liked to blame our paper, claiming it wasn't "consistent enough", and the magical solution was to buy Xerox paper. We refused, and simply pestered the shit out of their support people (fixed price support contract), calling them every time a printer started jamming regularly, if they were not on-site already to fix one of the other printers (they broke/crashed regularly.)
How is this relevant, you wonder? Well, the first lesson with laser printers is to never re-use paper in any laser printer. The slightest dirt scratches the imaging drum, a crease or wrinkle causes a misfeed or jam, and so on; you don't want to know how much damage a single paper clip can cause in a 35-40ppm digital copier, either. Inkjets are fine in this regard, but the complex paper feeding mechanisms in laser printers/copiers don't really like anything but pristine paper. The slightest thing like, say, the rubber on pickup/feed rollers getting a little too hard with age or less sticky and....
Oh, and the high-speed (20+PPM) printers have to slow down as the paper gets thicker. Dramatically. This fancy paper is probably thicker.
If they can't build a printer that can handle "fresh out of the box" copier paper, how do they expect to be able to handle paper that's been even *slightly* used once, much less five times? Other problems: staples; people who want to write on pieces of paper; finger oil/coffee spills. Etc. Now you have to stock two kinds of paper, your printer has half the effective paper capacity since it now stores two types, and users have to decide on usage prior to printing ("do I want to save this for more than 16 hours? Do I want to write on it?"), have the proper drivers installed, etc. I had enough trouble getting people to print duplex to save paper- and most of the time, people didn't bother to set up the proper printer driver, or even call us to do so.
PS:Despite the issues with newer (last 2-3 years) Xerox printers, where the profit seems to come from service contracts- if you have lots of little personal-sized printers, do yourself a favor and replace them with a MUCH smaller quantity of small/medium-size workgroup network printers. The supplies are cheaper per page and you'll have to stock fewer *kinds* of supplies as well, the supplies (like drums/toner cartridges) last longer, they're designed to be more serviceable, they're usually faster...and they're not built-to-a-price as badly as the "personal" units (HP 1100, anyone? :-)
Please help metamoderate.
you've just been slashdotted biatch
This fits into a category of "that would be cool, but I can't buy it yet so why should I care?". I just can't think of a way to put that in a one-word tag or even a two-word jumble tag. I was thinking RSN (for Real Soon Now) but that could apply to other things besides products we can't buy yet. Tagging it vaporware is a bit too pejorative; they aren't all vaporware. That would be a separate tag. "Cantbuyityet" is short, but it's much too jumbly, even considering the tendancy for tags to be jumbly anyway. Articles like this occur frequently on Slashdot. This article sort of fits in with the "fancy hi-tech paper" category. A similar vein is "readable e-books". Then there's the ever-present fantasticly dense storage or reasonably-priced flash drives that compete with spinning drives. It's always "just a year or two away" or "under development" at some huge corporation. It's fantastic enough to be cool, just on that fuzzy border of tech where they could surprise us and release it next year, or we might not get it for 10 years; or longer. It's not un-believable, but it's just not here yet. I can't buy it. It may very well exist in a research lab someplace, but... you... just... can't... buy... it. tag: cantbuyityet. Sorry. It's the best I can think of. Any better ideas?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've used inkless special paper technology in the 1980's. It was probably the very first printer to use with my somewhat new 8-bit Atari. But don't leave the special paper out in the sun or near heat for very long or it'll turn brown.
One could make a killing selling this paper with a sort of light pen and light eraser. Just like a pencil, but without the erasor shreddings.
The picture in the article looks like the ink is barely readable, except for printing large logos. Or am I missing something?
Mine doesn't require ink either. But the fainting spells I go through when trying to print 100 page documents with my blood are a bit of a drag.
The only possible benefit of not requiring ink is the implied savings in not having to pay a hojillion billion dollars per picaliter of the stuff. So now we have a printer that requires no ink, but only works on proprietary paper. Wonder how much that's gonna cost.
Even if it is reusable, how often do you plan to print something on a piece of paper that's been handed around, smudged, creased, and sneezed on, over and over again? These days, the only things I see printed are documents that are meant to be a bit more permanent than e-mail, and I'm willing to bet that Xerox expects to see a lot of this paper being printed once, then put into a three ring binder somewhere or printed once, then used as a coaster and discarded.
In short, this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem looking for a profit margin.
I want the fire back.
In old days kids say 'Dogs ate my homework' excuse. However, in near-future kids would say 'why my papers are blank! Oh! I forgot I was using xerox inkless printer to print out my homework!" This one sound like right thing to use on Xerox ads, I am sure all kids want this xerox inkless printer by now.
what appears to be paper, stuck together with stubstance x. when high presure is applied the sheets stick at that point, making a color, assume black, but could be any color. erasure occurs when the 2 sheets are pulled apart by vaccumm. but not such that the paper is torn. however, if this is not the case, well, someone will just have told my idea.
Too late, Bluetooth
Ya and CD-RWs really caught on too.
Thermal printers are nothing new. They have been around for ages.
All i can say is "wow". But i wonder what will happen to HP, in case this thing catches on. I mean, they are after all a printer-cartridge company, right?
>>Good news, bad news
>>
>>Doesn't need ink but it does cost $1 a sheet for the paper.
Let me guess, you simply turn it upside-down and shake to, um, *refresh* the e-paper?
don't like the original terms? erase it and start over, good thing the original signatures are still there!
now paper is going to become $0.25 per sheet!
They're using their grammar skills there.
I am really excited about this new technology, both in terms of cost and also environmental impact. Since I know these things typically take years to make it to the market, I was hoping Xerox might speed the process up. First, fire whose ever idea it was in the first place. This will eliminate the need for them to work up the verve to form a startup and produce something that is actually worth owning--potentially shaving years off the time to market. At the same time, promote any and all naysayers at the middle management level, especially the ones who claim this product has no "potential." Finally, go ahead and start drawing up filing papers against those who ultimately succeed in capitalizing on this fantastic, paradigm shifting idea.
It's a tough road ahead, Xerox, but the strategy is sound and has the weight of history on its side. Good luck.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
It seems to me a two-wavelength laser pointer could serve as both "pen" and "eraser", so that you could mark up documents without damaging the paper. Many times I have to print a draft of a letter or presentation and run it by the executive, who will probably mark it up with handwritten corrections and send it back to me. They have every right to edit something they have to sign or say until they're happy with it, but it does waste a lot of paper. If I could substitute erasable paper for each proofing stage, it would probably cut out 2/3 or 3/4 of my paper use, but in order to do so, it needs to be human-writable and not just printable.
Hopefully this erasable paper can be photocopied without making it fade. That would solve a lot of the problems caused by fading over time. If you find you want to keep something you wrote on erasable paper, just pop it in the copy machine and it's now on permanent paper.
If Xerox does get it to work in color, it could be a great way to proof document formatting as well. There are things I just can't spot without actually printing a document, such as whether a shading makes text within it illegible. If the document is important enough for me to polish up and proof thoroughly, it's probably going to be in color. It doesn't have to be perfect color, just "business color".
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
This reusable paper has some uses but I think it's overrated. If I'm going to print something out it's usually so I can give someone a copy. I hardly ever print stuff out otherwise. You think I'm going to give 100 pages of expensive reusable paper to someone, just because they don't want to read the doc on screen, or I can't hand them the "electronic" version?
What people should work on is a cheap (energy+resources), nontoxic and safe way of producing paper from renewable trees/plants.
Then when you see people who are accumulating stacks of paper, you can thank them for helping to keep CO2 out of the air.
The really significant thing would be if laser printers could create continuous tone images with this paper. This would be a huge breakthrough.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
looks like DRM and copy protection can make there way to paper now
In Soviet Russia... paper erases you!
I'm a 2000 man.
Disclaimer: I've worked for Xerox as a tech.
Your statement would be correct if it wasn't for the fact that all money Xerox make is not from ink. That is true only the soho (small office/home office) market that Xerox now have retired from.
The word "consumables" cover everything from the ink/toner, cleaning kit, fuser and other mechanical parts. There are, in some printers, even daughter boards that are considered a consumable.
Most of the time the printer is not sold to the customer - it is leased for top dollars (or euros, skr, nkr whatever) including a service contract. That is where the money is.
.. on paper.
I think this is mislabeled as inkless printer and should be labeled something like "reusable paper printer".
This concept is fairly similar to the thermal printers which also require special paper. The images on them do wear off after a period of time as well. Have you ever pulled out your best buy four-year extended warranty, with attached receipt, only to notice the receipt is completely blank? I think most warranties will cover the item without the receipt if it has, and they have recorded, a serial number. Though I doubt anyone ever thought of reusing thermal paper.
I don't know about you but I have had limited success reusing paper in a printer. Many times I will have a huge printed document I no longer need and on occasion I have attempted to reuse the paper, or at least the side that I have not printed on, with limited success. I no longer do this because of the increase of paper jams and the like. I cannot imagine trying to run the same piece of paper through a printer 50 times!
This looks like something that will never go into commercial production as with most things people are most concerned about costs and though ink is not cheap, at least not how it is packaged for printers, it looks as if the price is being shifted from the ink to the paper.
It has been publicly know for quite some time that companies that produce printers do not make their profit from the printers themselves but from the ink that the printer uses. If you purchase an ink jet printer from your local Wal-Mart more than likely you are paying less for the printer than it cost to produce but the company figures that over time they will make up the cost by selling you ink. If this type of printer were to become commercially available then I imagine the same pricing model would continue and the paper would be the expensive part.
So, you have a printer with expensive paper, that can be reused, but only if you are VERY careful with it, don't fold it, cut it, put it in your pocket, etc. No thanks, I'll stick with my overpriced ink and do what I want with the cheap paper and when I'm done with it I'll put it in file 13. I'll be long dead before trees go extinct and I won't get whatever disease you get after long term exposure to the chemicals this paper is coated with that will only be discovered 10 years after people have been handling this stuff on a daily basis.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
On the upside, any printed text would be sterilized. No more worrying about those nasty paper-transmitted HepC epidemics. Also on the upside, when I drop pizza sauce on all my papers at lunch, I can reprint/reheat them for an afternoon snack.
The Mesopotamians also developed a printing technology which does not require ink of any kind. The ancient technology included reusable "paper" which could be printed and erased dozens of times and had the potential to revolutionize printing. Details on this ancient technology, which was first reported around 1000 BC, are revealed in Wikipedia. These wax tablets were subsequently popularised by the Greeks and Romans.
In the subject, I'm speculating that Hammurabi, conqueror of Mesopotamia around 1792 BC and legendary for bureaucracy, probably have used Wax tablets alongside his more durable clay tablets. After almost 4000 years we're finally getting back to the paperless office.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Inkless printer? Hahaha, I've discovered printerless ink! And who's pr0 here? =]
I dunno. I work in an office where they have big containers for dumping in used paper, to be discarded securely. But the info is still probably on the paper when it gets picked up, and anyway are sure it is completely gone? And what about cold temperatures, maybe it lasts longer etc. It seems like a pain in the butt, why not just recycle paper is what people will think. We may have a bunch of printers all around but there will inevitably be people who hav accidents with paper that fades inappropriately, in fact I've seen this with faxes (fading in 6 months and it has been a big problem in once office I was at).
Besides which, I am quite allergic to the mold (could be ink but I think not) of aging paper. For example a newspaper bought in the evening on a rainy day is itchy, I get itchy when I go into stacks in some libraries, and some people in the office seem to have reservoirs of itchiness around their desks. I usually copy things to make new copies but this way I won't be able to do so. I always ask for digital copies instead but people for some reason always print things out.
I for one won't be buying this and I can't even see recommending it, having had experience with disappearing business documents. Just for safety you won't want to have a magically disappearing variety. Now maybe if it was a different color, worked thousands of times, and had some other useful functionality I might change my mind. For example, how about using it to simultaenously print a dot pattern like Anoto's. The pattern fading away would just delink it from online systems, but you could still print the page with ink. You could even designate sensitive information only to be printed without ink. But you're going to have to prove then that it really is gone even invisible to a hires scanner.
Do you work with Senator Stevens? You'd better have the IT guys clear out the series of tubes so you can get your internets faster! It should be an easy enough job to clean out the internal tubes, but I don't know about the external ones... better take this one up with Congress.
(I'm kidding, and I mean no disrespect to the parent poster.)
they'll appear one day, and disappear the next! Thus resolving the problem of counterfeit money. :)
Honey? Where are our wedding pictures? All I found are these photos of football games.
Wait a minute, WTF?!?!
(Hope the couch is comfy!)
OK. If I were the type to take bets, I'd posit that it won't take long for someone to find a non-destructive way of bringing back old prints.
Your average office worker (or even executive) doesn't intuitively understand that hard drives retain imprints of old data even after "erasure." What's going to happen when re-writable paper shows up and wants used? There are a lot of internal documents that have a limited use life and would, from a purely mechanical sense, qualify as candidates for reusable paper. Plus, even if reusable paper is only two or three times more expensive than standard bond, office policy will probably encourage paper re-use as a budget maintenance measure. However, this makes it likely that some poor clerk will at some point take the paper used for internal docs and "rewrite" them as something uncontrolled. Or, a corporate spy could grab a stack of material, feed it to an internal "rewrite" copier, copy it once, then rewrite over it with something like the company's public financial statement, and exit carrying nothing but "legitimate" public documents.
Just a caution: I really, really advise that this tech not be used for controlled data...
Now look, I know there are some very smart people over at Xerox. But there is a very long list of reasons why this is yet another invention destined to fall by the wayside.
The most important reason is that the wonderful thing about paper is its malleability. You can fold it, you can tear it into strips, you can crumple it up in a ball. People will do all of these things, with the possible exception of the latter. The paper is specifically designed to be very similar to ordinary paper, so in an office which uses both you will end up getting the two confused. And just using the paper will destroy it. Paper is voracious for skin oils and dirt on your hands, for example; it just lifts it right off of your fingers. And what about grease spots and the like?
There is also the problem that it actually reduces security as compared to the paperless office. You can still scan the documents before they are erased (or before they self-erase.) Keeping the data on the computer is far more secure. And, it is highly likely that using an electron microscope (or similar) the contents of the pages can be read back - maybe several pages. But this paper probably won't be shredded, because it is perceived to be blank.
In the end, the inkless office is a pathetic half-step to the paperless office, which SOME people really HAVE managed to attain already.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There was a paper that didn't require ink. The old fax machine used spools of this paper called "fax paper" which was a paper that didn't require ink. The fax machine used heat to create an image. I think some checkout printers use this paper as well.
It could erase too just leave in the sun.. (I had a receipt go blank on me because it was in the sun too long). Of course not reusable.
In general, people just want to be able to use plain paper with their printers.
So presumably instead of selling outrageously expensive ink cartridges, this "special paper" will be outrageously expensive instead....
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Having previous worked at Xerox on one of their production systems as a programmer, I can say with absolute certainty that this will reduce paper consumption drastically.
The machines I worked on did upwards of 100ppm letter. One dedicated test lab (QA labs) goes through maybe ten to two twenty thousand letter sheets a day, every day. Developer test labs go through about 10% of that, maybe one or two thousand. There are numerous such labs for each product line.
Now, as a developer, I printed an average of 15 pages a day for development purposes (not including what I did at the test lab). Some days I wouldn't have any prints, and other days I'd print out ten hundred-page duplex stacks to hand out. These could be code diffs, printer logs, diagrams and charts, etc. This doesn't include personal documents, but those are comparatively few and far in between. I was but one software developer among a hundred. All the paper goes to recycling, but IIRC, the paper we tested on did not necessarily come from recycled paper.
But imagine if all that could be reused the next day. The logs, the code diffs--imagine if all that paper could be stacked up neatly in a corner at night, and then reloaded into the printers the next day for use again. Imagine if most of the paper in the development test labs could be reused (after all, only QA and testing of specific functions needs fresh paper). 16-24 hours would be more than enough time for such documents.
The best part is that the laser can now write directly to the piece of paper, simplifing the printing process dramatically. Heck, the whole xerographics subsystem, toner, fuser and all, could be ripped out of the system, leaving only the laser to transfer the image onto the paper. And the speed of prints would be limited by the physical limitations of the rollers and paper path, not by the space on an intermediate transfer medium. Imagine the margins on a printer like that. The most expensive components gone. The most complicated system gone (no more hardware or software engineers to maintain and improve it). Obviously, I don't work there anymore.
Of course, they'll have to up the number of writes to at least a few hundred before it really becomes useful, but after a something like a piece of paper has been through a few hundred greasy programmer hands, I don't think anybody would want to touch it anymore.
does the technology by any chance use any quantum devices? ;)
I don't feel like it...
For printing stuff to function, I've been trying to buy synthetic paper from a company named Yupo, part of Mitsubishi Labratories, and found recyclable paper materials which can be printed on with inkjets (though most of their paper is designed for high volume offset printing).. This inkjet paper is from Japan and they don't sell it at their us division. I asked yupo's us division if they'd sell me some of another kind of yupo paper (cleanpaper for drawing/writing) from japan and have had no success getting an offer. A us cusomer service employee told me a month ago that he sent my message requesting this other kind of paper to Yupo's us marketing division and contacts in Japan; i've gotten no reply. If enough people offered to buy Japan only type paper, they'd probably sell it here. I'm passively interested.
Yupo does have many drawbacks. Of note: 1. Mostly for offset printers. 2. can't use standard photocopiers and standalone laser printers because it will melt the polypropelene which the paper's made out of. 3. Work's best at 20 to 25 degree celsius (70-80 degree fahrenheit I estimate) 4. It's plastic and it takes petroleum, which is highly valuable.
Maybe a process to make such plastic from vegetable oil is available; maybe there are laser printers designed to not overheat paper. The problem is that laser printers use a fusing method which bakes ink set in the desired image: maybe there is a way to cold fuse the ink to the paper. I think that the the laser probably doesn't cause a melting temperature when it scans the paper. But considering that Yupo would definately want to sell such a product, their lack of it signifys that such technology probably isn't available
While this goes against the idea of direct reuse, it bypasses the need for paper. Humans have enough problems but this probably isn't going to create any problems, if its implemented, as long as there are a lot of ink jet printers to handle quick photocopies and such.