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?
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!
I haven’t sent someone a postcard in oh… ever, but apparently they’re still popular enough in countries like Japan to warrant a company like Epson to produce a dedicated printer for them. The Address Expert E-800 and E-600 have a 5760×1440 dpi resolution but can obviously only print postcard sized documents, and they both feature a 7-inch LCD display which I’m going to assume has to be touch sensitive. (It also doubles as a digital photo frame when not in use FYI.) Both printers are PC and Mac compatible, but the E-800 model pictured above includes a wireless keyboard allowing you to compose messages directly on the printer. “Wish you were here!”
Not that anyone prints anything anymore, but if you’re one of the few who prefers hard copies of colorful things like digital pictures and you can’t stand waiting the thirty seconds or so it takes for a nice print, have a look at this new type of printer called a Memjet. Memjet printers don’t use a traditional print head that scans back and forth over a piece of paper; instead, the print head is just as wide as the paper is. All that has to happen is that the paper gets fed through the printer, some 70,000 tiny little individual ink nozzles do their thing, and there you go, one second per print. No warm-up time, no slowing down, just really fast 1600 dpi color ink prints:
Memjet technology should be showing up in printers in the US later this year for between $300 and $500.
It doesn’t quite have that magical exciting warm and fuzzy spur of the moment cheap plastic instant gratification feeling that traditional polaroids do, but the Tomy Xiao TIP-521 digital camera does provide the same basic functionality: immediate physical access to pictures. It does this with a tiny built-in Zink printer, which uses special pieces of composite paper embedded with heat activated yellow, magenta and cyan dye crystals to make 2″ x 3″ borderless prints with sticky backs. There are no ink cartridges to replace, you just add more paper, at about $1 a sheet.
With a printer packed inside the camera, there isn’t much room left over for optics (the case is pretty bulky looking as it is) so I wouldn’t expect wonders from the 39mm equivalent fixed focal length lens and 5mp image sensor. For that matter, I wouldn’t expect wonders from the printer, either. But I would expect the camera to print out something a mere 60 seconds after you snap the picture, which is no small feat in of itself.
The Tomy Xiao TIP-521 will be available in Japan on November 28 for about $350.
Even though we were promised that innovations like the PC, email and wireless communications would pave the way to a paper-less office, just taking a quick look around my desk alone tells me that dream is still only a dream. Now I will admit that things have vastly improved when it comes to paper use thanks to those aforementioned innovations, but sometimes you just need a hard copy of a receipt, invoice, ticket or other important document. And those ‘sometimes’ always seem to pop-up when you don’t have easy access to a printer. So as an alternative to having to deal with the people at Kinko’s, Staples or even your hotel’s concierge when you have a printing emergency, the PRINTSTIK from PLANon allows you to easily carry a printer with you while on the road, just in case.
Now don’t think for a minute that the PRINTSTIK is going to replace the laser printer or inkjet you’ve got at the office. While it does come in a very convenient and easy to transport package, it also has its limitations that will probably prevent you from using it as your default printer. I had a chance to see what the PRINTSTIK was really capable of, and you can read my full review after the jump.
Related Tags: Innovation, Printers
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