Radical New Printer Technology

I’m tired of having to pay exorbitant fees for ink and toner. I now have five different devices in my home office that print on paper: inkjet printer, laser printer, copy machine, label printer, and a fax. The last two are thermal, so I just have to buy special paper (haven’t been suckered into buying one of the plain-paper fax machines yet – the old thermal ones still cost a fraction of the cost to run and we rarely need to do anything with the pages that come in except read them). The first three items, however, require buying expensive inkjet or toner cartridges. As we should all know by now, printer companies make more profit on ink and toner than on machines. Like razor blades.

What we need is a new technology! What follows is my latest prediction inspired by mass quantities of caffeine and poppy-seed muffins:

Laser printer with no toner.
Media = coated paper that responds to specific wavelengths of light to produce color.
Printer = the same basic form factor as the inkjet, but the print head would be an almost weightless laser (maybe three lasers). A one ounce print head could travel lightning fast, would require a much lighter drive mechanism and would be super quiet, totally clean and maintenance free and the pages would come out dry. No heat required, no cleaning cycle, simpler mechanism, smaller footprint, lighter weight, lower power requirements (portable?). What’s not to like?

The hard part is the paper of course. Once that technology is perfected though, it would infiltrate every aspect of the business world. And since this new coated paper would be manufactured in mass quantities, the economies of scale and the simplicity of manufacturing it would drive the cost down much below the current cost per sheet (much smaller investment in hardware and no toner/ink and little maintenance). Assume that the printer makers would be forced to standardize on the same paper technology (like thermal fax paper did). Soon, all copiers and printers would print in color. Color would eventually become cheaper than black and white because of volume pricing. Also, printers could be miniaturized for all sorts of special applications.

When you think along the lines of this latest technology pipedream, the current “ink spraying on paper” or the “heat fusing of carbon dust on paper” technologies seem really crude and destined for oblivion. How much time would the world save not pfutzing around with the copy machine getting toner all over or trying to clear paper jams because of the tortuous paper path?
For those who are thinking that I have just traded one consumable (ink) for another (paper), you’re right, but I maintain that it is a good tradeoff. Maybe it would take time to become the new standard, but it would inexorably win out because of the huge savings in cost and reliability of the printers.

Maybe I should apply for a $5 million government grant to study the impact just from an environmental perspective......

Ubiquitous Cellphones

I just upgraded my Cellphone for the first time in five years. I suppose this puts me really behind in keeping up with technology, but I guess you could call me a selective early adopter. Everyone has different needs and my old phone did virtually everything I needed it for. Yes, today’s models do much more, but my old Qualcomm Thin Phone suited me just fine and I have mixed feelings about retiring it. As the name implies, it was thin, only half and inch and slips into your pocket and feels good in your hand. Truth be told, I haven’t seen a phone even today that is so thin. Besides that, it worked fine and the menus were simple and easy to navigate and it held 200 names and numbers.

So, why did I upgrade? I was basically forced to since the old phone was no longer compatible with all the system upgrades Verizon has been making and they wouldn’t let me upgrade to one of the newer plans unless I got one of the new phones.

So now I have one of the dreaded flip phones. At least that is what I considered them to be while I had my trusty Thin Phone. I’ve gotten used to it and even like some of the features, like the fact that the phone picks up when you open it and hangs up when you close it. Much more intuitive. But of course it has all these annoying ringtones and options for assigning the Star Spangled Banner to a specific caller and the Minute Waltz to anyone who blocks their Caller ID, and another to... You get the picture. You can also tag cute little pictures to each name in your contact list if you are, you know, like 9 years old.

The other thing it does is text messaging, although I haven’t tried that yet. I read that this is all the rage in Japan with the rest of the world quickly catching up. In Japan it is apparently a cultural thing; having you phone ring in a quiet place is considered rude so it is common for people to just check their messages frequently and leave the ringer on the lowest setting or off. Consequently, if you are standing in a subway station in Tokyo, you can expect that literally half of the people standing there will be staring into their phones either playing games or punching in text messages furiously.

It makes me wonder where we are heading, cellphone-wise. I also read about how in Japan and other countries they are incorporating RFID technology into some phones so they can be used as smart cards to pay for subway rides, vending machines, even as proximity ID badges for access to your apartment or company. Your phone is going to be your lifeline in more ways than one. Losing your phone will not only be extremely inconvenient, it will be embarrassing when you can’t pay for your train ticket or get into your apartment. The question that comes to mind is how will people protect themselves from this happening? Will all your personalized data be implanted in a chip under your skin so you only have to replace the dumb handset? Maybe the handsets will become cheaper, even disposable when they reach the commodity stage.

Of course, we are a very long way away from that here in the US, given that we have so many competing standards for cellphone communication. Europe is far ahead of us in that regard, using GSM everywhere and even only charging for outgoing calls – how logical!

Slight change in direction

This blog used to be called "Technology for Seniors." Although I remain interested in the development of products for seniors, I have decided to change the format for this blog and shift it in a slightly broader direction.

Whereas products for seniors need to encompass those who are not as technically oriented as the younger generation, my attitude now is that all high-tech products need to be simplified more. Consequently, I am exploring how technology evolves from leading edge new products that have yet to be proven in the marketplace, to the other end of the spectrum where a product has been refined many times in response to customer feedback and achieves a state of design excellence in regard to ergonomics and ease of use.

My observation is that we are beset with products that are both difficult to understand and poorly designed for our evolving lifestyle. Of course there are exceptions, but for the most part new technology immediately goes through a transformation powered by consumer feedback, both positive and negative. Some is marketplace driven, some is from data collected by technical service people. Companies that understand this try hard to stay connected with their customers through a good customer service system.

Therefore, I am moving toward a discussion of how products travel this road toward perfection with an effort to define what that state of design excellence is. Also, I am interested in ways to shortcut the process. In some ways the design community is already addressing this through better education and a thoughtful evaluation of what makes a successful product. If you read previous posts, you will see many that highlight products that have serious design flaws and are desperately in need of a push toward better ergonomics or simplification.

The name for the blog is still relevant. Mature Technology is that which has undergone the transformation to design excellence. General use products that have achieved that goal don’t necessarily have to be ubiquitous, but their features and controls must be intuitive and easy for non-technical folks to use and enjoy. The things is, when you have designed your product to those standards, it is appropriate for anyone and everyone, including seniors. From there it is a short path to making modifications for those people who have hearing or eyesight or motor skill limitations. Example: I just upgraded my cellphone and although it is smaller and the buttons are closer together, it has a feature where you can have the phone speak the numbers as you press them so you can confirm that you hit the right numbers. A very simple improvement that addresses these types of problems elegantly.

I encourage interested people to e-mail me with suggestions for topics or just to discuss these issues.

Networking Headaches

Just spent several days and an obscene number of hours trying to get my home network back working normally. Everything deteriorated when I installed Windows XP service pack II upgrade on all three computers in my home. This is supposed to be more secure by virtue of a built-in firewall as well as several improvements to the IE browser, among other things. It also cleans up and integrates dozens of earlier hotfixes.

Of course, after I spend several hours per machine backing up files and installing and configuring the upgrade, no one in my family could log onto the internet for more than ten minutes before they were booted off. They either had to log off and log on again or restart their machine, or recycle the router. You can imagine the bitching I was getting. I almost started to feel empathy for the IT people in my last company. Almost.

Anyway, after three intense days of trying everything I could think of including spending many hours online with the tech support people in India, I finally tried disconnecting an older Belkin switch that worked fine before the upgrade. Viola' problem solved. After everything started working again and the pressure was finally off, I quietly took the old Belkin switch outside and unceremoniously flattened it with a 25lb sledge. For some reason I didn't recoup all the wasted hours by doing that, but it felt good.

Now that I am in a more reflective mood, I am thinking about how vulnerable we all are when we lose internet connectivity. My wife and I both run our businesses from home and my daughter is enrolled in online college classes. We also each keep in touch with friends and relatives via e-mail. It was only a couple years ago that we had a dialup connection and only one person could be online at a time and it was so tedious that no one spent very much time there.

Now it has become an integral part of our lives and when it crashes, the impact is felt immediately. Setting up a home network can be relatively easy if you have fairly new machines and they all have the same operating system, which is likely. Fixing it when it crashes is not easy. The software built into Windows is almost no help.

I consider myself to be fairly literate when it comes to computers, less so with networking. I wonder how many people in LA are on the phone with their ISP or their network hardware Technical Service people right this minute tearing their hair out. I'll bet the number of people increases significantly every day.....