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."

Fantastic

[dbolger]

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 will never work.

[miroth]

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.

Can't see this working in the real world

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

No cost for ink!!!

[Lumpy]

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.

I can hardly wait!

[Dunbal]

As if the $2000 per gallon of ink wasn't enough, now we'll have $300 sheets of paper...

jamming

[SuperBanana]

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? :-)

Re:Fantastic

[UncleTogie]

Let me get this straight....A /. geek is recommending that you not back up your hard drive to another medium? Whether WORM, MO, paper, {insert your fave medium here}, "important email messages" SHOULD be backed up. It's either that or a bunk hard drive means your data has been lost, found, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months before getting recycled as firelighters.

Re:Fantastic

[Sam Ritchie]

I agree, although I have to also say that improving mail server performance is probably a lot cheaper, quicker & more realistic than waiting for an exotic printer to hit the market.

I have a mental image of almost every retarded manager in my organisation going "Excellent, some piece of technology that can magically make my problem go away without me expending any effort to try and actually solve it."

Re:jamming

[drix]

I love how the default reaction of /. to someone who thought of something that /. didn't is a mad rush to come up with some trivial, glaringly obvious nitpick that's primed to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. As if Xerox simply put 700 monkeys in a gymnasium and somebody peeked in one morning to discover that they'd just happened to invent a new, revolutionary way to print things.

I mean .. these people have PhDs for crying out loud. If Xerox designed a whole entire technology around reusable, reprintable paper, then something tells me they'd spend a little more time engineering the reuse part of the equation, no? So how relevant? Not very, I'd say. Yesterday's printers weren't built for it; sounds like tomorrow's may well be.

Re:Fantastic

[RebelSponge]

I kind of doubt this kind of technology with dramatically change the way businesses currently use paper, because a lot of the paper that is currently "wasted" is printed out so it can be marked on. Kind of pointless to use reusable paper if you are going to mark on it.

What's wrong with using normal paper?

[TheLink]

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.

Re:Fantastic

[arodland]

This "inkless printing" tech isn't valuable for making a printout you can doodle on, unless they can make a matching "inkless pen". Otherwise you erase the sheet for reuse and the "blank" paper still has your notes on it.