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?

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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 ]

11 COMMENTS

  1. 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.

  2. 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?

  3. $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.

  4. actually i like the concept but i think it cant be workable for corporate sector as well as industrial sector where documents and manufacturing is the major part ,at the time how we can play with one paper or 10 papers , and we will use the same paper everyday then it will not be looked like new paper so for some important area work we cant use this printer , its really costly too… this printer can use a company who has limited work area.

    But i like the concept really. do more work on that !!!!!

  5. This is genius! $5,500 is quite something, and each paper is $3.30.. 1000 paper is $3,300 already. I don't know how long it will be before the printer starts to pay itself

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