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.

Define "consumable"

[kent_eh]

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.

Under a very narrow set of conditions...

[ErikZ]

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.

usefullness?

[green1]

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.

Yeah

[Overzeetop]

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)

Re:usefullness?

[oh2]

A lot of hardcopy is only read/used once or twice and then recycled. Sounds like a great idea to me.

Re:Define "consumable"

[cohensh]

Unless it runs without electricity it consumes that as well.

Re:Define "consumable"

[morgan_greywolf]

Pro-tip: Anything that's "resuable" that has a limit on the number of times it can be re-used like, say CD-RWs or this plastic paper, are actually consumable.

Still, if it really does last 1,000 times (which I doubt), and you're only printing stuff for temporary consumption (as in, you aren't keeping hard copies of anything locked in a filing cabinet), you actually could save enough money -- if you print enough, that is.

I've been in the copier printer business for 30

[p51d007]

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.

We've gone electronic

[Overzeetop]

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.

Re:Yes but....

[Bootarn]

One can hope that they release a .ppd, making the printer usable under GNU/Linux, *BSD and OS X at the same time.

the bean-counter math does not work out

[Ancient_Hacker]

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.