Computersight -

In the seemingly never-ending battle to reduce the use of paper in offices, Xerox is working on a reusable paper which can be printed with no use of ink at all. This could be a sensible approach to the overpopulation of paper stacks in today’s offices worldwide. Then again, it may be another Xerox failure.

The new idea is still a few years away from being marketable. Still, if and when it is available for consumer use, it may have a positive impact on the cost of printing short-term office materials and may reduce the use of “real” paper.

The idea is simply another attempt to become a paperless society. The stacks of papers in most offices reveal the failures in these attempts in the past. The use of personal computers has not actually cut down on the use of paper. Although we can read material from computer screens, most people prefer to print out something that they prefer to keep a while or to read more carefully.

The adoption of LCD (liquid crystal display) brought new hope of reducing or eliminating the use of paper. However, most people tended to print anything longer than a couple of pages in length. Reading from paper is more pleasant to most of us than reading from a screen.

The technology that Xerox is working on now involves a new electronic paper, a reusable paper with a short life for the printed material. This paper will be able to be reused up to fifty times. The printed material will fade after a few hours, depending on the environment in which it is stored.

Rather than depending on ink, this paper is exposed to particular wavelengths of light to produce the image. This elimination of ink should reduce the cost per page of printed material. The short lifetime of each printed page reduces the stacks of printed papers in the corner of the office. Even if the cost for the printer and the paper are a bit higher than presently, not having to invest in ink helps to keep the cost of pages within the present range.