Friday, February 5, 2010

PrePeat Printer Needs No Ink, Will Soon Be Murdered By HP

By Evan Ackerman

Paper is a huge waste of paper, and ink is a huge waste of money. The PrePeat printer could be a huger waste of money, but at least it doesn’t use paper or ink. Instead, you feed it special heat sensitive plastic sheets and it uses a precision thermal head to print out gray scale text and images. Feed the sheets through the printer again, and a different temperature will erase everything or just write over it. Don’t wash, don’t rinse, but feel free to repeat up to a thousand times with a single sheet of paper.

The PrePeat printer itself costs $5500, and each sheet of the special plastic paper is $3.30, which is certainly a tad steep. Want to know what else is a tad steep, though?

graph

That’s piracy, man. Piracy on the high seas of ink. It may not actually make any fiscal sense whatsoever for you to replace your personal printer with a PrePeat (think more like a medium to large office that’s still stuck in the seventies) but it would strike a blow against the tyranny of the empire of black gold. Huzzah!

VIA [ PopSci ]




  • $5,500 is very steep... To replace the color & black ink in my printer it costs about $30 bucks in total. If I were to replace the ink once a month it would come to $360 a year. By those estimates it would take slightly over 15 years of usage to meet the price of this printer in ink. I'm not so sure it's entirely worth it.

    It's also really not that eco-friendly either...you put a LOT of toxins into the air when you make plastic (especially if it's recycled). Most of the paper we use comes from tree plantations. (they plant new trees after clearing an area)

    So, I really don't see how this is good for the environment or my wallet.
  • It's nice to know that there is now solution to decrease spending paper, but using special paper is far too expensive also. So I suggest that you should still use the normal ink-jet printer than this.
  • Jessicat
    It will only be a shame when you have to give these papers to other people. That's $3.30 a handout.

    Also is there a certain heat that makes it disappear? Can this be recreated outside of the printer?
  • japonların son harikası izleyin yazdığı yazıyı silip tekrar aynı kağıt üzerine yazı yazabilen yazıcı
  • mcman
    I have noticed a cutoff point for people who print everything out and people who realize they can easily store data on a hard drive. That point is the age of 55. Of course I expect that to keep rising as PC literate people get older.

    No matter what I tell older people at my job they continue to print out thousands of documents.

    I'm sure HP realizes the generation of print everything people is getting older by the minute plus it's not as easy to make ink as people might think. It requires a lot of processing and problems involved with size, color and shape.
blog comments powered by Disqus

The best mobile phone deals can be found at Best Mobile Contracts

Compare mobile phone deals on contract



The Overflow
Powered by Twitter
    follow us on Twitter



    All contents copyright © 2005-2010 OhGizmo! All rights reserved. Privacy Policy. Powered by WordPress.