My friend was sitting and reading the newspaper when he heard me thus exclaiming.
As usual he had a wise crack to further exasperate me . Why don t you get rid of the printer totally" Oh yes, why not? And how will I manage to print my stuff without a printer?
Well, you can try sticking the paper to the monitor to get an imprint on the paper. Only you may need to buy a special PC and paper for the purpose. Wow! This is Einstein reincarnated.
And what about printing the documents? I ask, playing along with his idea.
For both, you will need to remodel your PC/Laptop. Attach a paper tray to the PC. Have a slot for a paper tray on the side of your laptop, a la a CD drive or floppy drive. Once you give the print command, the paper will go in from one side, get printed on and come out from the other. Don t you think I am great?
Sure. You have the most fertile mind around. Why are you not working with PARC?
Come to think of it, what do you think we will do if there was no printer in the world? There have been endless discussions on a paperless world, but what about a printerless world. A paperless world is not a reality, at least for quite some years now. In fact, it has been seen that the demand for paper has increased with the growth in global business.
The change from analog cameras to digital ones has also helped in this growth of demand as it has brought printing out of the professional dark rooms to our study rooms. We can now take unlimited number of images without incurring the extra cost of film rolls. The more the number of images, the more the urge to print. It is difficult to replace the use of paper in all business and legal dealings, or when prescribing medicines, printing e-tickets or issuing boarding passes, packing shipments, or going to bed with a printed book in hand.
Environmentally speaking, we can foresee a restricted use of paper. Therefore, if the use of paper is permanent, the use of printers should also be permanent.
According to a recent article in SiliconValley.com, it seems we will soon have printing facilities where ink cartridges will be redundant. Zink Imaging, a Waltham, Mass., firm whose name suggests its ambitious objective: zero ink, promises a technology of printing photos without ink, a printer cartridge or a cumbersome printer occupying space alongside your PC. The company s researchers have been working towards the development of a special kind of photo paper that needs no ink. It will also result in the redundancy of expensive printer housings or cartridges.
The printers will have to be embedded into portable devices such as digital cameras or into accessories for cell phone cameras. Presently, the Zink prints 2-by-3-inch picture in 30 seconds and comes out developed and dry, unlike the Polaroid cameras of the 1970 s. A thermal heating process is applied to print the images on paper, similar to fax machines. The plastic paper has layers of plastic in the middle with numerous minuscule crystal dyes that can be stimulated by heat. You can get the different colors by heating the paper at different degrees and for varied time spans. The basic colors can also be mixed to print any color. Zink can print only on special paper and currently poses no threat to companies like Hewlett-Packard, Epson, Canon and others. It is slightly costlier than inkjet prints but with time the cost will surely reduce.
Zink is trying to cater to the market demand of portable printing for someone who wants prints immediately. It is aiming at making our lives simpler by eliminating inks from printing. The next innovation will certainly be a physical elimination of printers from our lives.
I don t think the day is far off when my friend s imagination will become a reality and we will actually be taking prints from in-built printers.
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