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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
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?
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?
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.
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).
eBooks: print out your ebook onto something somewhat resembling an actual book, with real pages!
Then, when you're done, feed the pages back into the printer and print another book. It might work if it had some kind of reversible binding process that wasn't too cumbersome.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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?
That doesn't make much sense to me. Regular books may run from 150 to 400 pages, so you're looking at least $1000 in "paper" costs. For that price, you could purchase two Kindle DXs, or an iRex. Both of these options save you the printing time and allow you to store and view multiple books; the iRex would also allow you to make annotations.
Whereas, if you print on this special paper, you wouldn't be able to annotate or write on it, since you need to reuse the paper. That pretty much negates the advantage of printing something out in the first place.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Oh come on.
Paper clips.
Bulldog clips.
Deleted
The printer I'm getting ready to market kills less kittens.
Fewer. Fewer kittens use less kitty litter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKlTAxTvKkY
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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?
"This video contains content from Sony Pictures, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."
You insensitive clod.
It's too late. Don't you read "the wall"?
Sig: I stole this sig.
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.
... 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.
"This video contains content from Sony Pictures, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."
You insensitive clod.
Strange, I can view both videos.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
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.
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.
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.
They are smaller pages, though, and you get four per sheet from the fold. They do, however, need to be ever so slightly different sizes and loaded into the machine in a precise order.
So yeah, way more effort than it's worth, although I can see "reusable book" kits adding circa $300 to the cost of the already expensive printer.
Easier to get a NooKindleRS-505, probably more convenient, too. Unless you're a curmudgeon who needs to have something to turn, but still wants to enjoy electronic distribution of books.
Would take a *long* time to pay for itself at current book prices, though.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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)
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
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.
Did you read the whole sentence? You are probably from another country.
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 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.
It's the usual agenda of course. Change is bad, and change that requires me to think and make a decision on a regular basis is worse.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
How do you know they wouldn't be right? If you have to do 7 passes to securely erase magnetic data, maybe you'll need to do multiple passes with random bitmaps to securely erase these sheets. If enough erase passes are needed, then you might be decreasing the re-usability of these sheets to the point where they're no longer cost effective.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
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.
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...
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
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
So does your immune system.
If we did NOT kill germs, THEY would kill US.
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.
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)
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.
I'm not sure your "best case" use cases are really accurate... first, I'm not sure I've ever seen a printer with a 1M page lifespan. I understand that you chose that number because that's the claimed paper-equivalent in one pack of the PET, but in reality, a lot of that investment will probably be wasted. And you neglected to include toner cost in your laser printer case.
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... :-/
Are you seriously asking office workers of the USA to use their brains? I think you'll hear from their union, that was never in their contract!
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
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've seen plenty of printers with a 1M impression lifespan, but you're not going to buy them for $200.
I used to implement printrooms with digital printers producing several million impressions per month (we used to joke they needed to do a minimum of 1 million just to keep the engines running smoothly) but they are hundreds of thousands of dollars per device not including the operating costs.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
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...