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Print.... Using Water .... Anyone who owns a printer knows that printer ink is expensive. Water would be much cheaper. Chinese scientists reporting in the journal Nature Communications say they have made a simple printer that uses water instead of ink. The printed characters last for a day on special paper, which can then be re-used. “Every time you print it's fresh,” Sean Zhang, professor of chemistry at Jilin University in Changchun, China told Discovery News in an interview. “We are using a commercially available inkjet printer. We just filled the cartridges with water and put it back. It’s like normal printing. The magic is in the paper.” Zhang is a former researcher at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Menlo Park, Calif., and is now a professor at the State Key Laboratory of Supramolecular Structure and Materials at Jilin. He said that printing typically involves large amounts of waste paper and expensive ink to prepare documents often read only once. This method allows the paper to be reused numerous times and could potentially have cheaper associated running costs. Zhang and his colleagues developed a special coating on the paper that responds to the water. So far, they have been able to print various Chinese and English characters using blue, magenta, gold and purple colors, using water as a key that activates the dye molecule. The next step is to combine colors to get black, Zhang said. The possibility of reusing paper instead of throwing it away is intriguing, according to Kira Barton, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and an expert in high-performance printing technology. ( end) __________________ How expensive will the paper be? |
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It's for sure what ever it is will be cloned... but the matter is How and Who will set up the Industry modification in Western Nations to capitalize on it... since so many Nations have outsourced their productions already to China.
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This technology will certainly change the printing world in many ways, including some of the fore-mentioned benefits. As with all of such advances, it will have other advance to take flight from this new development. One day, Paper may be able to hold multiple pages of different material on a single sheet, and you simply touch it and it expands to fill the page and touch it again and it minimizes itself on the page and another page of data can fill the same space. We have that function on the computer, by the digital page, but to have it printed with that capability would be very interesting. I guess it would be like the old microfiche... but one won't need a magnifying glass to read it.
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