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New Type of e-Paper Can Be Used Up To 260 Times
joaommp writes "Taiwanese scientists developed a new type of film that can be printed on a thermal printer and erased up to 260 times. The boffins at the Industrial Technology Research Institute claim it as an ideal replacement for paper signs and posters. It does not require patterned electrodes. It is based on a plastic film covered with cholestric liquid crystal, a type of liquid crystal structured similarly to cholesterol molecules and can be erased by simply plugging it to a power source and an A4 sheet costs only US $2. It is expected to be available to consumers within the next two years."
We've had etch-a-sketch for years now. The most of the point of printing is so that it doesn't get erased.
...A manufacturer has invented a more durable buggy whip using exotic space-age materials.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Because that would just be weird !!
The only time I EVER print ANYTHING is one of the following
- It is something I need to give or mail to someone else (assignment, form, etc)
- It is something I want to keep forever in hard copy (a manual, a picture, a diagram to pin up)
I don't see how having expensive, erasable paper will help either of these situations. The situation the manufacturer quotes doesn't even make sense - what is the use care for these paper signs you want to print off, and yet change all the time????
Don't think so. Wake me up when it does full colour, with a proper white background and the same kind of dynamic range as old-fashioned ink on regular paper.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Indeed. You can not take the $2 per paper and divide it by 260 and add the electricity costs to get the total paper costs, because most of the papers would still only be printed on once. At $2 per paper, that would be idiocy.
Did many boffins die to bring us this information?
"Buy rabid squirrel" turns up over 98k results, you lose. Also:
"Buy stone hammer" turns up 69.8 million results
"Buy purple people eaters" turns up 1.94 million results.
Anyways, I don't have a problem with buggy whips but they're obsolete. Why work on advancing obsolete technology?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Unless it can play angry birds consumers will not react favourably to it.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It seems a case of 5,000 sheets can be readily had for around $45 or less. That means at leas 222 sheets for $2.
As this can only be reused 260 times, that gives a rather small windows of savings. Seeing all the common things that can reduce/eliminate the suitability of paper for a second use (staples, holes for binders, crinkling, tears, etc) as well as sheer laziness and apathy of people...
Office managers probably are better striving for a more paperless office to save $$$ and environment.
Hey I'm not the one arguing for buggy whip research in the age of electric cars.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...erased up to 260 times... and an A4 sheet costs only US $2
(1) You'll have a job selling a European pinko-commie A4 sheet measured in spawn-of-the-Devil millimeters* for US dollars. They'll give up their 8.5 x 11 God-fearin' inches Letter when you pry it from their cold, dead 3-ring binders.
(2) More seriously, that price has got to come down before it makes financial sense. Lets see - A4 paper... google.. about $3.83** for 500 sheets, so to break even you'd need to use each bit of ePaper, hmmm... $2 / ( 3.83 / 500) ) equals... 261 times! Oh, wait....
(* They say you can keep foldin' it and it keeps its aspect ratio. WITCHCRAFT I tell you!!!)
(** OK, I totally fudged this but its not far off...)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Even ignoring the issues with the required tech and the price, a problem remains: There's no way a sheet of paper will remain pristine enough to pass through a printer 260 times without jamming under any kind of realistic conditions.
I highly suspect that even under completely unrealistic usage conditions, it'll jam the printer after the 5th-10th time or so. Printers bend the paper and don't have perfect alignment, and that's got to add up eventually.
Besides, it's a thermal printer. Nobody uses those except for printing tickets, and for that reuse makes no sense.
Even ignoring all that, nobody is going to bother with figuring out what paper can be reused and carefully putting it back into the printer. If this invention has a practical use, it has to be a very niche one.
I could see this as part of a countries currency. Mind you not the whole note. But you could have a strip on the currency that gets updated with a new code everytime it hits a bank. Then replace the notes after the 200th use. Could be used for tracking currency and preventing counterfitting.
Well, I can see this can be used at some point as funky wallpaper and commercial posters. It makes sense of-course, the thing that would make it really stand out would be if they also developed a way to print on it without taking it down. So if they can have a printer head, that is the size of the sheet of paper itself, that you use sort of like a stamp. You select an image, touch the printer to the paper and it leaves the necessary impression - picture on the paper and you didn't have to take the paper down, that would improve efficiency and save time and money for the stores.
If not that, then you have to print the new picture and bring it with you, then you have to take the old one down, put the new one up, the amount of time it takes to do this goes up, where is the efficiency?
You can't handle the truth.
He's in luck, "Buy helmet" turns up 65 million results!
I have a crazy idea. Let's make paper out of a reusable and renewable product instead. That way, when you're done with the paper you could just toss it on the ground and wait for it to biodegrade, or perhaps process it back into its original condition.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Members of collarme.com are all around the US and no, that site is nsfw
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
"If you can blank it by applying a current to the entire paper, can you blank a portion of it by applying a small current to that part of the paper?"
Do you want print AJAX driven web pages, or what?
Here's hoping that one day my fellow idiots in the USA will adopt standard paper sizes... Along with all the other international standards they so blatantly love to ignore.
What B.S. I can buy more than 260 sheets of paper for $2 (yea, I pay attention to sales and buy several reams at a time.) So why would I ever fool with this junk when simple paper is less expensive, and I can print it with existing technology, can keep it indefinitely (not going to do that with $2 a page printouts) and I have all the other benefits of normal paper (including color printing)? Seems like something for fools with too much money like Ed Begley jr, but outside of a few wackos who is going to fall for this?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Soon we will be told that powering all these ePaper displays costs more environmentally than simply using a new piece of paper, like let's say because generating the power requires resource consumption that has worse impact on the environment. Of course I'm being sardonic, because this HAS happened before, supposedly green technologies that cost more than they save.
Scumbag anonymous coward that failed to RTFA and failed to notice the post was consistently based on the same units as the article.
Scratch that! Scumbag anonymous coward with too much time on his hands and nothing better to do than being a prick.
Onda Technology Institute
Your math is bad, I don't pay any where near that much for ink/toner. I sometimes refill myself and save even more, but even just buying supplies intelligently I can print for far less than you. And lets not forget to factor in whatever is needed to print in sheets of the pricy paper, and even the extra desk space that would be needed for a second printer. No, this is just crazy talk.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That's actually a really fucking dumb idea, when you consider humans use paper at a faster rate than it can be naturally recycled. Recycling it ourselves helps the situation some, but have you ever seen 100% recycled paper? It's not something you'd want to run through your photocopier or laser printer. Recycled paper of any significant quality needs fresh wood pulp to be added to it.
So the solution is not to simply go with one or the other, it is to use a combination of both. If you're printing something that is going to be kept and not reused, then print it on conventional paper. If you're printing something (like say, a newspaper) that is going to get blanked and reused after a short period of time, then use the new shit. Do you honestly think the people inventing this stuff sat down and said "Well there's like no market for this shit, let's waste a bunch of money developing it anyway"? Of course there is a market, and of course this invention will be relevant to us as humans. Any invention that that can help reduce our reliance on natural resources should be welcomed with open arms, not shunned like Quasimodo bearing the black plague...
Cool post bro, highfive \o
I disagree. Everything should rely on natural resources. Any invention that will prolong the frequency of the biological cycle for those materials should be welcomed with open arms. If at any time during the process the product becomes "not" a naturally occurring biodegradable substance (or something that at least degrades into that) should be shunned like Quasimoto bearing the black plague. We don't need products that last forever. We have that now, it's called plastic.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Using this as changable wallpaper is a really awesome idea. If nothing else you could simply change the color of your walls to/from white/black in summer/winter and help augment your heating and cooling bills. Me? I'd design my own wallpaper and change it every month or so. Plus you could print family photos and artwork directly onto your walls! No more frames to square up every time your fat buddy comes over.
Cool post bro, highfive \o
How is a sheet of PLASTIC covered in liquid crystals ever more environmentally friendly than paper???
Ask, and ye shall recieve.
1) Creation of paper uses trees, a renewable relatively clean energy source.
Renewable, sure. But how quickly? It takes a long time for a tree to grow to a respectable size. We use paper a good bit faster than we can regrow it through natural recycling.
2) Plasic requires Petroleum.
Actually it doesn't. Ever heard of bioplastics? They use oils and fats from plants such as corn and wheat rather than petroleum.
Degradation of paper is simple quick and clean. Plastic does not degrade so quickly or clean.
Actually some bioplastics are designed to be bio-degradable. They are already in use to make bio-degradable garbage bags.
Just imagine either a landfill with 200 million sheets of paper or a landfill with1 million e-Sheets.. come back in 6 months. Most of the paper has decomposed. 1 million e-sheets are still there showing how environmentally friendly they are.
Using the proper components, none of what you claim as issues in your post will actually be issues. So either you are spreading FUD or you are truthfully ignorant of the subject matter. If it is the former, knock it off. If it is the latter, then I hope you and others have learned something new today.
Cool post bro, highfive \o