Reusable e-paper rolled out
Held without charge
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.
According to Frank Hsiu, a senior official at the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Hsinchu City, the 'tree-saving paper' only requires heat to "store or transmit images onto the flexible display." It can then be erased with a thermal writing device similar to that used in fax machines. Urm... with electricity, no?
As it stands, i2R e-paper can be used up to 260 times.
The Institute has recently passed the tech over to a Taiwanese company and reckons the product could hit markets in a couple of years, where it has potential to be implemented in e-books and electronic billboards.
Meanwhile, I've avidly encouraged reusable e-paper since I was a six year old. It might take half an hour to write what you want to, but nothing beats an Etch-a-Sketch. ®
COMMENTS
hhhmmm
Are you sure they haven't invented Pencils, Paper and Rubbers?
reuse "up to" 260 times?
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.
Reusably grim
Yeah, no word on reusable toilet paper yet...
So how many times can you wipe within it
before it needs to be flushed?
No power?
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.
