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......