Reusable e-paper rolled out Green-tastic boffs have created rewritable e-paper with a 300dpi resolution that needs no power to be viewed. A team of Taiwanese scientists have developed "i2R e-paper", which apparently needs no backlighting and thus uses no electricity. i2R e-paper According to Frank Hsiu, a senior official at the Industrial Technology …
Perhaps the intent is that you would have an external powered device you would run the paper through (perhaps heating using a laser?) to write to it. It would then be like normal paper you would load into a printer, sounds kind of like a re-writable version of the thermal paper they user to print till receipts.
Sounds like they are using a scheme similar to CDRW disks.
i.e. changing a compound from amorphous to crystalline and back, but it changes colour at the same time.
Would be neat if they can make reuseable "multifax" paper that isn't so expensive as eink,
even a 250x rewrite limit would save a fortune in paper not to mention the environment.
The original E-ink (aka Gyricon) was supposed to work like this, and in fact it does to some extent even though the paper is nearly 4 times thicker that of a normal A4 page.
IIRC the problem was that in order to write new information it had to have a reliable contact.
Not likely when the paper is being handled a lot and getting fingerprints etc everywhere.
The nanotitanate based E-ink works better but again this has the same problem.
Maybe the solution is to use a higher temperature variant.
Essentially the oil used is solid at room temperature but becomes a liquid inside the printer.
In fact colour could be done by using 4 different oils and printing at a lower temperature on each pass, similar to the Zink printers.
Would have the advantage that the material would be archiveable.
AC/DC
There's bound to be a hand-cranked version for the hard core greenies.
How is the readability?
On another note, this isn't the first time something similarly "re-usable" comes along, but the take-up always seemed a tad low to me. Even cd-rw and dvd[+-]rw. Or maybe it's just me. Show of hands then, who's used such re-usable things more than a few times? More than once? Anyone?
..sorry, Caleb. I'm not sure if you're being positive about this item or not. It seems straightforward to me - uses a heat source (electric or otherwise) to make the picture/print, and then that's it. It can be viewed as normal paper and re-used when you've done. Sounds like a good invention. Buy a newspaper made of the stuff, read it, then get it updated the next day. A bit like a Kindle, but without the electrical gubbins.
Plus, it won't lose all your info when it gets shaken around.
Even once you add in the cost of consumables, the price for (black and white) printing on conventional paper is measured in pennies per sheet. So this stuff had better cost less than a fiver for an A4-sized sheet.
Oh, and what happens after 260 pages that makes it unusable? Is it a case of gradual degradation in quality that becomes unacceptable somewhere between 200 and 300 pages? If so, it will have to be even cheaper still, coz a pad of paper maintains maximum print quality right up to the last sheet.
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