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A Printer That Uses No Consumables
jimboh2k sends word of a printer introduced by Japanese company Sanwa Newtec, called the PrePeat RP-3100 (a play on "repeat"). It prints on A4-sized sheets of PET plastic, and these sheets can be reused up to 1,000 times, the company says. The printer uses heat transfer technology rather than ink, and so has no consumables. There's a video of the printer in operation at the link. The PrePeat costs about $5,600 and a supply of 1,000 plastic sheets will set you back another $3,300. However, the company gives a use case in which a corporation saves $7,360 per year on consumables, as well as putting less CO2 into the atmosphere. So far the PrePeat is available only in Japan.
Are there Linux drivers ?
These proprietary plastic sheets sound a bit like a consumable to me.
Yeah, they're re-usable. But if it's stuck in a filing cabinet then you can't re-use it now can you.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
What, the company is supposed to supply a use case that doesn't support the product?
How soon until one doesn't feel guilty about throwing away a sheet?
Great, so long as you never pin the paper up, fold, wrinkle or spindle it. Never get oil on from your fingers on it, coffee stains, pen marks, or tape residue.
Until they include a box that will shred the old "Paper", melt down and extrude new paper, this is worthless.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
At $3+ a sheet the hardest part will be to train managers not to throw the printouts away after the meeting.
That's great and all, but if I was keeping the physical piece of "paper" I wouldn't need to print it in the first place, and if I did need to print it, I would want it to be permanent, so I wouldn't be ever re-using the sheet. I print things either because other people need them, so I'd be giving away all my expensive plastic sheets in no time flat. Or because I need to keep a permanent copy, so I would never re-use the plastic. Many of those I didn't give away would have been cut up to make quick reference cards, labels, etc.
If they came up with a way to do this with plain paper (say some form of laser etching which required no toner/ink/film/etc) I'd be interested, but as long as it only works with it's own proprietary "paper" this is pretty much useless.
For writing on these sheets with?
No ink but paper costs $3.30 per sheet? How is that better? Yes they say it isn't most printing done to have a "hard copy" of something? You wouldn't want to erase in that case.
This is nice, but misses the purpose of more than half of most printing - to distribute to other people and to mark up your own copies. If I give anyone else the sheet, it's no longer recyclable by me. If I mark up a hard copy - or just make notes while I'm in a meeting - it's no longer reuseable. What about staples?
If I've got a dozen people in my office, it would be cheaper to simply buy them each a KindleDX - and I'll never run out of paper there.
(Yes, I'm being negative today. I'm sure this has a niche - like a training center where you can update your handouts for each class, as long as thy can't take them home)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The Great Global Warming Swindle
Fucking assholes. The printer I'm getting ready to market kills less kittens.
SO TAKE THAT!
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
I really wonder how much savings can be gotten here. Personally I'd estimate about 70% of my prints ends up in my archive: I only print out stuff that I want on paper for administrative reasons. For looking up later, or for tax/legal reasons.
The 30% rest is mostly misprints, and of those about half ends up in my archives again: I always attach receipts from shops to a standard A4 size paper, number them, and in future I can always find them again.
And what is still left over... well my little kid loves to draw, and I cut up a lot to A6 size for notes. Overall maybe 5% of my prints go to waste. Very little of those intentionally (as in: printed without intention to keep it).
When I had to write reports (research related) I did print out drafts, but would not use this kind of paper because writing on it with a pen if it works would kill the reusability. And being able to add annotations and other notes to such a draft was part of the reason to make the print. The article mentions manuscripts (how about above mentioned manual notes?) and circulars (anyone that doesn't use e-mail for that, maybe combined with a few prints on a notice board?) don't seem too valid to me.
Now I don't believe in the "paperless office" myth but a little prudence in printing goes a long way. This printer is a cool invention but honestly I can't really think of any large-scale applications where not printing is really not an option to save cost.
So the plastic sheets cost $3.30 each (if you buy 1000). A ream of paper costs about $5 if you buy just one. The likelihood of actually reusing the average sheet of this stuff 1000 times is negligible (10 times would be lucky in the average business environment), especially since I wouldn't be surprised if the sheet wouldn't be usable again if it ever got folded or creased. It seems like it doesn't make economic sense.
I also don't see how this prevents CO2 emission. As I see it, paper causes CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere because trees are grown specifically to make paper. Paper is almost entirely composed of CO2 that was previously in the atmosphere. Plastic, on the other hand, is a petroleum product, and using more oil is definitely contributing to increased CO2 emissions. It doesn't really make environmental sense either.
Now it is possible that there are a few cases that it might be more environmentally friendly if an organization somehow retools itself to make perfectly efficient use of this technology, but this would be difficult, unlikely, and it's definitely not going to be cost effective.
I guess it's at least a neat idea.
What happens when you want to staple more than one sheet together. Most things worth printing take up more than one page, and those binder clips are always bulkier and more prone to falling off than a good old-fashioned staple. But hey, as long as we're "fixing" the "problem" of finding an alternative to a fully-renewable resource...
Despite the naysayers this sounds like a great addition to many offices. Lots of paper sent for recycling.
In my case that means shredding it, turning it into paper briquettes and burning it in my woodburning stove. Like free heating from the old office waste... Actually come to think of it this is a shit product, forget the running costs, look at the capital expenditure!
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How easy is it to re-use plastic sheets if they've been torn, stapled, folded, dog-eared, and so on? In the real world things experience wear and tear. In most printers I'm familiar with, the paper path is fairly sensitive to these kinds of irregularities, so unless they are using something more like the bypass tray, I don't think that this printer is going to be all that reliable or fun to deal with.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"about 0.3 yen a sheet/number of times of rewriting."
Correct me if I'm wrong but this cost assumes you don't need to keep a hard-copy, i.e., you're printing to said sheet 1000 times.
In other words, if you never keep a copy and always reuse the sheets you'll save cash... The ratio of sheets you wish to keep to sheets you consider disposable has to be high; why else would you print something if not for long-term reference?
Also, staples?
If you have a lot of notice boards (with the notices behind a window) you can use this printer to recycle old notices and put new ones up. These notices are not touched or punctured and are replaced frequently. If you only have a single notice board your probably better off just getting a flat screen monitor that displays the notices (probably cheaper given the cost).
If you ask me, I think that epaper, eink, or some other bistable and non-emissive display technology will be the way that people in the future will manage documents that aren't intended for permanent posterity.
And with the unit itself priced at over $5K, I really don't see this taking off anytime soon.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Honestly I love this idea. I could print up a whole PDF at a time, and read it like a book or manual when I need it; all the things that are too straining to read on a monitor for any lengthy period.
years, I've seen "green" ideas come and go, but still here we are 30 years later, and we are still putting ink or toner on paper. In the mid 80's, the "paperless" office idea was run up the flag pole, and friends of mine said I better look for another line of work. I just laughed. I said as long as we have a government, with regulations, we'll have paper. These idiots have to justify their jobs some how, and paper reports is how they do it. When the HIPPA laws came into being a few years ago, my work load INCREASED, just from the extra copying & printing those silly laws generated. For the past few years, I've tried until I'm blue in the face to talk people into going toward electronic filing & document storage, only to be told no, because "we've always done it with paper". It's a mind set...people don't like change and sometimes will push against change. In the early 80's, fax machines were taking off big time, but it was hard to convince people to give up messenger services and go with a fax machine. The fax was faster, cheaper than using a courier service, but, some would say "we've always had a courier". Now, I'm having the same problem getting people to give up a fax machine, because scan to e-mail is faster, and cheaper, but people say "we've always had a fax machine". People just don't brace technology sometimes. I gave up trying to change peoples minds. I show them the benefit, the cost savings, the time savings, and if they don't get it, I just let it go. Their money, not mine. Human nature......go figure.
I wonder how long the text/images last after being printed? Also, how about making notes on the paper? (Maybe a heat pen like silverpig suggested?)
Vast numbers of trees are killed every year because office workers print out stuff for each other, then chuck them in the bin /recycle box.
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In any normal company, I would rather buy a large eBook reader (such as the iRex), that also has an option of annotating documents. In that way you don't have the weight of the initial expenses. And you have things like (rudimentary) search options and such. A long running tablet PC may also step into this niche. It's amazes me that many of these eBook readers don't come with a "printer driver". It would be a good way of converting documents to the right format and it would serve as a nice way of showing that the device can replace more paper than just books you buy in a store.
I know, I know, I just dumped on this in a previous post - but I've found an application (at least for my office).
I deal with architectural prints which are usually D or E size (thats ~A1/A0 I believe). Often we'll have architects send us 6 or 7 revisions of 10-20 sheets for a small project. It's nice to be able to see them "full size" and make minor marks, but when the next revision comes out that set gets recycled. We could easily reuse these sheets several times. Of course, we'd need some kind of heat pen (and we usually like to use red).
Still, the cost would have to come down a lot. Since I can't send these prints out (without paying a fortune per sheet), it would have to be a purpose machine - and really only worth half of what a "real" printer would cost - maybe $2500 for a 36" wide print head. And the sheets would have to be priced noticeably favorable paper with break even somewhere this side of 20 re-printings (so about $0.25/square foot).
Still, it's a real use for this kind of thing.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Oh come on.
Paper clips.
Bulldog clips.
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Dunder Mifflin Paper Company better watch out!
It looks like paper, is lighter than a full stack of these sheets, and can be rewritten a many times as you want. For about 1/12 the cost of the printer alone.
Did you notice that the printouts in the video looked a bit washed out, like it doesn't really get a good black?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
And that can be reprinted in less than 0.01 seconds. In color!
It needs no. consumables. at. all!
I’s called a display!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That doesn't mean we don't generate paper. I go through 500-1000LF of 36" wide paper a month, plus probably 1500-2000 sheets of letter (we only have 4 employees). What we don't do is keep the paper. Everything either gets scanned and the paper recycled, or printed to PDF and never committed to dead tree form. The savings isn't in paper and printing - it's in storage. I was looking at having to buy storage space and filing cabinets (very expensive for large format drawings). At $1-$1.50 a sheet at the service house, it was cheaper to scan and recycle than to buy cabinets and store. Two years ago we dropped $15k on a large format scanner (well, it copies and prints, too). The result is everything we've ever designed it on the servers (and backed up in two places) and at our fingertips in less than a minute, and I'm not paying for a storage unit somewhere.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The whole problem with this concept, is that it fails to realize is that, as seemingly insignificant a piece of paper is, it is a thing, and it does have value. This value is in its permanence. Good paper products will utterly outlive us, and that's why we use them.
It is why some people insist on a paper audit trail when we vote.
It is why we tend to like to get paper receipts and statements.
It is like even a pointless award or certificate, but printed on nice paper, can mean a great deal emotionally.
So, when you have re-usable paper, its like, you are giving back your receipt, your award, your audit trail, your gift, your thing. It creates this whole environment where you are in the office and the one thing you used to be able to get, a piece of paper from the printer, you now have to give back. It's honestly smacks of so much corporate money grubbing greed that you "hey, that good conduct award I printed... well, I need that back so I can re-use the paper...", well, you have to give your life record back to these people as well?
What a terrible invention, and a what terrible people that we have become to even think that such a thing should be invented.
This is my sig.
This printer is only good if your printing out e-books. You could probably end this e-book reader revolution crap with this technology. Your not going to run out of ink and once your finished with a book, you can just go to amazon and pay $9 and get to printing your new book.
This could save millions of dollars in education alone. I used to tach a science class and would make hundreds of copies every day. This could save schools millions.
I've given up on Slashdot's comment scores.
They want their printer back.
would seem to put a crimp in the 1,000x reuse, at least at my compnay....
if you go to the web site, in fractured engish ( http://www.sanwa-newtec.co.jp/english/products/rp_srp_3101_e.html ) we find the following, Quote
"When the dirt of the sheet is awful, washing with the special sheet cleaner and a regular cleaning in the printer are necessary."
this suggests that the eco ness is a bit less then meets the eye
... or any other isolated work environment, like a submarine, military base, etc.
But as soon as those plastic sheets start making it home in people's brief-cases and notepads, the cost of operation starts to creep up.
Its an interesting niche product that solves one problem ( consumables ) at the expense of creating another problem ( proprietary, expensive print substrate ).
-S
All it takes is for one management-type to keep a 100-page report on her shelf to blow your entire savings for the year.
Vast numbers of trees are PLANTED every year because office workers print out stuff for each other, then chuck them in the bin /recycle box.
There, fixed that for you.
Come on, people: recycling is great and all, but it's not like trees are an endangered species... They're like Doritos: print all you want, we'll plant more! Trying to "save trees" by not using paper is like trying to "save corn" by not eating as much! If you actually reduce the consumption, the producers reduce the plantings and we end up right where we started.
Besides, throwing away paper REDUCES your carbon footprint: trees absorb carbon from the air, it finds its way into paper, which we put at the bottom of the landful, thereby "sequestering" the carbon more or less indefinitely.
Let me help:
Innumerable living, growing tree-friends are slaughtered every single year because office workers print on tree-organs for each other, and then cast aside the remains after they've had their way with it.
The video presentation mentions that a single sheet of this so called "paper" costs 300 yen, which is around 2.5 euros. I can buy packs of 500 sheets of paper for that price and if I go for the really cheap, disposable kind then it becomes even cheaper than that. Moreover, regular paper has plenty of exotic uses such as writing on it with a pencil and/or pen. Will you do that on a 2.5 euro A4 sheet of paper?
I would say that "A4-sized sheets of PET plastic" count as consumables. This is a marketing scam.
I believe it has to do with cutting down native forest (lots of biodiversity) and replacing it with plantations for making paper
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Let's do the math and crunch the numbers. I'm going to assume "Best Case Scenarios" because that's what marketing always does. In reality, we know that's rarely the case. I just grabbed quick prices off the web, without doing a lot of price comparison. These calculations assume no discounts.
Dead Tree cost:
Laser printer: $200
2500 sheets of paper @ $21.59 x 400 (1 million sheets): $8636
Total: $8836
Renewable cost:
RP-3100 Printer: $5600
1000 sheets (up to 1000 uses each) (1 million sheets): $3300
Total: $8900
While the setup costs are high for the "green" printer, over time you can save money if you do a LOT of non-permanent printing. Also, be sure not to damage your $33/sheet paper.
True, we're not going to run out of trees. The issue is more about the cost (both monetary and energy-wise) to produce the paper from the trees.
So, to me, the real question is: is one of these re-usable plastic sheets more efficient (both cost-wise and energy-wise) to produce than 1000 sheets of paper AND offsets the cost of purchasing and maintaining two types of printers (you'll undoubtedly still need traditional laser printers for some applications) AND the additional electricity to power both of them AND the additional trouble of keeping track of all the reusable paper?
Honestly, this strikes me as a very stop-gap solution anyhow. It seems like a temporary bridge at best between now and the time when we have ubiquitous and inexpensive access to digital pads that can completely replace printed paper altogether.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
In the vast majority of cases paper comes from trees from tree farms that have existed for generations. Why? Because land is not cheap. It's more economical to reuse land and plant new trees then it is to cut down old forests and plant new trees. The tail of the disappearing forest is a modern myth.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Each time you breath in you collect millions of bacteria-buddies, many of these do not survive. Bacteria buddy murderer.
I've got a boss who prints crap out all the time. Just random junk. Instead of forwarding an email to me, he'll print it out and hand it to me. And those random bits of junk get thrown away pretty quickly.
What makes you think that will also not happen a lot with these re-usable sheets?
That's the biggest problem I see, far too many people will treat them like paper and just get rid of them anyway. It might (might) work if you mandated that all printing only be done on this paper, but honestly the overhead of obeying the mandate and as noted the constant loss anyway from printed stuff that is filed means that you have just introduced a lot of time wasting bother into your organization and a lot more expense for printing supplies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
shit on a new idea that has been implemented.
It is a great fucking idea, it is in the very essence a step in the right direction, from which I hope new, viable technology will sprung from. You, who fucking criticize this shit, shame on you! Do you think green clean technology develops in the vacuum and in perfect way?
I applaud the company for putting their money where their mouth is unlike all of u fucking naysers who complain and bitch because it is not perfect.
I am very happy to see that technology coming out! Thank you.
The math just does not work out.
At $5,600 for the printer, just the interest alone is $300 a year. For that you can buy 100,000 sheets of copy paper a year. If you expect the printer to last 5 years, that's another $1,100 that could go towards buying almost 400,000 sheets of paper.
And I doubt if the plastic sheets can be reused more than 10 times in a typical office situation. They're going to get wrinkled, bent, curled, and soiled after just ten cycles. Most printers balk at feeding paper that is even slightly curled. Let's assume 10 uses is a practical limit. So this 33 cent sheet of plastic is now costing you 3 cents a page, ten times more than the equivalent piece of paper.
Now a good deal.
And you would buy them a 6 grand printer to do this on ?
They need to be re-trained, don't print any LOLcats out !
If it is at all possible to recover previously printed documents this could be a problem, otherwise I could see niche markets.
We had thermal printers in the seventies. They suck.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I can't believe all the dumb responses I've seen to this story (no offense to parent).
Every office I've ever worked in could use these printers. See, humans have these things called "brains", and they can use them to discriminate between "casual, print then reuse paper" documents, and those that need to be retained for a long time, marked up, stapled, sent out of the office, etc. If you have a color printer and a black and white printer in your office, and you're not making the equivalent judgments today, you're pretty unevolved.
Print on the "real paper" printer for some documents, use your "brain" to decide when to print on reusable plastic sheets. It's not that hard. The hostility to this product that I've seen in posts indicates the posters have other agendas. Which would probably be best printed on this recyclable paper.
I keep having to do math to debunk so many reports. The page that uses .3 yen as the sheet cost does not take into account sheets that are not returned. They are calculating it as if it is a closed system where every sheet print will be returned in re-printable condition. Pages can be lost, damaged , written on, or stored and never returned. The true cost of using these sheets is as follows;
((purchase cost) + (replacement cost of non returned sheets))/cycle size
Replacement cost is the cost to replace each failed sheet (damaged or not returned) over the life of one page as follows;
(purchase cost * failure rate * cycle size)
Therefore with a purchase cost of 300yen, a failure rate of 10% (I am being generous) and a cycle of 1000 the cost per printing would be;
(300 +(300*.1*1000))/1000 = 30yen.
Even with the questionable power costs added that would be almost 4 times as expensive as plain paper.
Bump that up to a 30% failure and you get a cost of 91 yen/printing and 11x the cost of plain paper. To the "no shedding costs" comments; there is still a cost to erase the pages before they are returned to the printer for recycling.
They also do not factor the cost of collecting, sorting and cleaning the returned pages .
Another aspect not touched on is print speed. According to the specifications the printer takes 3 to 6 seconds per page to print. I am talking about the commercial printers not the desktop version. Yeah I am going to wait ten minutes to print 100 pages. That is very poor throughput.
If "I'm a moron" coworker decides that shredding sensitive material is the ONLY way to go....
While what you say about carbon sequestration is true, it isn't proof that throwing away paper results in a net reduction in carbon footprint. Planting, harvesting, transporting, and processing trees is not free. I don't know either way, but it could be that recycling old paper takes less energy ("carbon footprint") than producing new paper.
Not to mention the marginal crop land (esp. in the SE) that is planted into Sou. Yellow Pine. 15 year rotation on paperwood.
5) have it rejected because the subject and body look spammy
The junk e-mail laws are much weaker than the junk fax laws. So people have to set their junk rejection filter higher.
Admittedly I did not RTFA, but I'd assume that you can't just write, scribble, etc on these...
The majority of short life printouts that I use at work end up with notes, amendments and changes scribbled on them. It's a good system.
Unless I can do this on this new medium, I can't see it being useful in our offices.
Never happened. True story.
There's almost no virigin forest being harvested in NA or Europe, they've all been either chopped down hundreds of years ago or protected in national parks and forests. Even if there were a virgin forest available for harvest it would almost surely be used for lumber instead of paper because of the superior beauty of old growth wood.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You know what makes one look silly, too? Writing "their" when it should be "there"!
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
How do you make your paper briquettes? Water, then a compactor, or what?
I make some woodstove "logs" from old cardboard boxes that I get from glanage, scrounging produce and fruits, etc.. Get the boxes slightly wet (by leaving them out in the rain, lol), then they are really easy to roll up tight, then they get wrapped with used and now recycled bailing twine (that I cut off of big round bales), then let dry again. I use that for kindling, or to get a fast heat boost in the morning when there are just some coals left. TIA.
That would have been a volume customer!
I've lived over here in Japan for the better part of 10 years, and I can totally see how this could make a difference. Every meeting I go to has a paper agenda handed out at the door, which is promptly thrown away as soon as I'm back to my office. My pigeonhole fills up every few days with--I'm not kidding--paper versions of the emails I've gotten.
Culturally, Japan is a lot more hands-on than the US. A lot of paperwork is still done by hand and most purchases are done with cash. Paper, actually, is a sacred object in Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan. It's dangerous to read too much into that, but suffice it to say that Japan likes paper.
This might really be useful over here, but I'm curious about build quality. Sanwa is a pretty minor computer company, mostly making cheap peripherals. Crummy generic Chinese VOIP headsets, etc...
The guy in the video said hyakugojuman en, which is 1,500,000 yen. or about $16,666.66 USD
Japan has had this tech since about 2006. Here is a Toshiba printer that uses the exact same technology. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6174052.stm
In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, these things were called flimsies.
what i usually print out these days are forms of some kind. this sounds like the heat print paper found in faxes and similar, and those are usually hell to write on.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I had the same issue with technicians. I switched to all PDF's for service manuals etc years ago, but had a hard time to get the rest of the service staff to do the same. Same tired old argument...but...but...but...I can put notes in the paper manuals. Well, you can put notes in the PDF ones also. Plus, It is a heck of a lot easier to find something in a PDF, doing a search, rather than thumbing through a paper manual. My laptop that I carry, I have the drive mirrored to another drive I carry with me, updated weekly, and another drive at the shop mirrored. If the drive crashes during the day, it's a simple manor of popping it out and replacing it with the backup drive. I wouldn't go back to a paper manual for anything. I'm a certified instructor, and everything I teach with, save for the paper tests at the end of the course, is all electronic.
I remember the same argument back in the early 90's. Until the dopes in congress catch up to the technology, there will be those who say email isn't "secure" (ours have secure email features). Congress had to pass another law to placate the lawyers so a signed and returned fax document was considered legal. Heck, I bet 90% of the dopes in congress can't even send a fax, without having 3,450 members of their staff to help out LOL.
For about $900-1200 (or more, but under 3K) i could buy a full convertible Tablet PC with 80GB+ of storage, way more than a 1000 sheets of paper and not need for $5K printer.
Just another cool, but useless very expensive tech fad of the week to show off with (almost just like the Tablet PCs, but they are least usefull in other ways)
the paper cost is just to high. thers no saving if anything the printer would be more expensive to run. they dont account for damaged or lost sheets. in the real world people don't keep there paper near and clean. and most stuff is not printed then tossed there normally given away to whoever needs it. conserding ink b;lack isn't that expensive. genrely 5 bucks and it can handel 1000 sheets before needing replacement on a quality printer. and toner can handel alot more prints before nedding replacment. of course toner does cost a good amount. color ink is still expensive and well this does not do color.
yea and plastic is so much better for the environment the something reusable like paper. paper can be recycled and we can always grow more. and no forest are cut down as its been said they are all protected. its like those tree huggers protesting loggers but forgetting they grew those trees themselves just for logging.
What kind of bistable display "can be reprinted in less than 0.01 seconds", as Hurricane78 mentioned? Last time i checked, e-paper displays needed over twenty times that long to repaint, which is why they aren't so useful for video. Sure, this printer probably takes even longer, but more importantly: Even if you weaken it to "can be reprinted in seconds", a $3 piece of paper is a lot cheaper to replace when broken than a $300 reading device.
D'oh! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
From the prices, alone, I'd say this printer is a bu consumer of... cash... :-/
Whoosh!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/30/2222219
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/16/1938220
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
I have no problem reading on my 1600x1200 dvi monitor. I also maintain a no-paper desk. Any documents delivered to me as paper are scanned and recycled. Any that I don't need are immediately recycled. Before I started this practice my desk was always a mess. Now it's always great.
Paper sucks...