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Prepeat Printer: Printing Without Ink, With Erasures

No, this is no April Fool’s Day joke – unlike the story of the fictional Epson “green” printer that was supposed to have its “debut” on Earth Day last year. That “printer” had as an environment-friendly feature the ability to recycle ink and paper, but that is just Jetson-inspired space-age fantasies working.

The concern about printer ink and cartridges and its costs, as well as its effects on the environment, has been around for quite a while. And there are people who are trying to develop technologies to address consumer concerns.

A recent innovation that is making the rounds of gadget and tech blogs is the PrePeat Desktop printer. A Japanese invention, the printer is dubbed as a “No Waste Eco-Friendly” printer by a post on Coated.com. It is innovative in that it does not make use of ink cartridges or plastic; instead, it makes use of a special print head as well as heat sensitive plastic sheets instead of ordinary paper.

Once the printed document has fulfilled its intended use – as most documents eventually do – its contents can be erased instead of simply discarding them. Once the contents are erased, the plastic sheet may be used for another print job. These sheets are said to be good for re-use up to a thousand times.

New innovation, however, does come at a price; but then again, didn’t laser printers and computers previously cost an arm and a leg? The machine reportedly currently carries a price tag of $5,517 and a set of 1,000 of the plastic sheets will set you back an additional $3,300. But who knows what the pricing will look like if and when this technology hits the mainstream.