Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

It has been suggested that one day e-ink will take over the world but at the moment it’s pretty clear that regular paper is still gonna be with us for a while. Toshiba has clearly accepted this fact and now have a unique printer that uses special rewritable stock to help reduce paper consumption in large companies.

The paper itself is sort of a plastic-like material not unlike what is used for the labels on soft drink bottles and like old-style fax paper it has thermal printing properties. Exposure to temperatures above 180 degrees will turn the page black while temperatures between 130 and 160 degrees will cause the pigments to turn white essentially erasing the page.

Of course this technology doesn’t come cheap. The B-SX8R printer currently sells for about $10,000 in Japan and the paper stock runs about $10 per page. Considering the special paper is only good for about 500 impressions it’s still slightly more expensive than just buying a stack of regular copier paper but in the end the main goal here is to reduce waste and become less of a burden on the environment.

The Toshiba B-SX8R was made available in Japan earlier this year but North America and Europe will have to wait until 2008 for it to arrive.

[ Toshiba b-SX8R @ ZDNet UK ] VIA [ Gizmowatch ]