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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.
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
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.
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?
A lot of hardcopy is only read/used once or twice and then recycled. Sounds like a great idea to me.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
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.
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?
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.