But I wonder how it gets over the initial friction of lifting and pulling the paper through as it goes lower on the stack. Surely there's a limit after which, you'd need to remove the completed sheets off the top?
From what I can see, it looks like there are a series of rollers that rest on the paper, which allows the printer to pull the top sheet with little, of any, friction.
Little friction against the device itself, but not the other sheets beneath it. The weight of the device + completed sheets on top will add to the friction between the next sheet and those below it.
It looks like this is just a design concept (not a prototyped device). In addition to the initial friction issue, the printed page would not be able to be placed on top of the stack after it got too tall. So, nice looking, but unlikely to be very practical.
I could see a way where if the device was fitted with springs of some sort it would be able to "stand" or lift itself to prevent that kind of friction (of course there would be a limit to the size of the paper stack on top, but you could probably design it / fit it with springs such that the limit is practical (and far more than the amount of paper someone would logically use for this)
There has to be a limit, but in most real world use, people rarely leave tons of paper on the printer without collecting it (of course there are exceptions).
Maybe the way they are looking at it is like this:
Top Paper
1 ---------
Gap Tray
2 ---------
Bottom Paper
Paper would be collected from bottom using standard scanner/paper style paper grabbing, scanned or printed to and placed in Gap Tray. Gap tray and entire top paper stack need lifted and placed back on support layer 1.
Pages would probably be upside down of their original unless they were fed back and forth.
All the paper would need lifted up, so there would be a limit, unless... a different idea would be the same thing along a horizontal track of papers.
Clever! A scanner that digitizes text as it destroys it can see some good use in a disposal/archival location.
The Gap Tray itself would still need to rest on something while it grabs the bottom sheet. There may be slightly less effort if it grabs the sheets from the side rather than from top/bottom. This way, has a shorter distance it has to pull through, but the friction may still be significant.
All this talk has really whet my appetite, though. Now I really want to see it come to life.
Reminds me of Vinge's "Rainbow's End", there was a device which shredded whole books, then sucked the confetti through a hose that had tiny cameras in the walls, and they stitched scans of the original books together in software.
Doesn't look like he accounted for paper that isn't stacked perfectly, but as in my comment above, it wouldn't be incredibly hard to incorporate that into the design.
I recall reading about this idea in the science-fiction role-playing game Shadowrun. It's set in 2060-2080, so technology is better in nearly all ways: including a printer design as described here. Very interesting, in the shadow of the total lack of progress in actual printer technology in the last few decades.
At first I thought, and don't see why this couldn't be, a scanner that eats through documents and saves a digital copy of them. This form factor would make digitizing large sets of printed records much more appealing.
I scan all my receipts and incoming mail, I doubt you would even be able to make a stable "tower" of these things. It probably only works with new paper. One of my first thoughts was also that leaving the paper open in the free would result in a lot of dust collecting on it.
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I've been moving to do the exact same thing at home, to get rid of all that paper clutter. If you don't mind me asking, what scanner do you use - presumably one with an auto document feeder?
This is definitely cool, but it strikes me as a solution looking for a problem. Mobile printers that print out a sheet much faster than this are available at pretty low cost. I'm genuinely curious to hear why someone would buy this--any thoughts?
I still have paper copies of important documents from the 1980s. I have no idea where the digital copies from that era disappeared to.
Paper has its place; it's a fantastic archival medium.
I also still print out contracts to review them. They're easier to mark up that way, and I can focus entirely on the paper -- including quickly leafing through it, while comparing multiple pages -- in a way that I can't as easily do on the desktop.
Paper isn't dead yet; it still has the best UX available for many common use cases.
Of course you have no idea where your digital documents from the 1980's are. In 30 years you'll still have your most important digital documents from today though.
Dropbox syncs a local folder. So yes it could be one way to bring documents forward. The paranoid among us would probably choose an alternate method, I'm sure you can think of many.
I am slowly and slowly trying to go almost paperless, I hear you. And because We can now get rid of almost every boring administrative use of paper, the really intersting uses tend to stick out, and you start to print things you really wanted to.
Like printing papercraft parts, big photos of anything you like, personalized trump sets, kids stories you read at bedtime. Honestly there's a lot of uses I didn't care about until there was no need to print tax forms anymore.
Either printer ink is made from unicorn blood or we're all getting screwed.
I think that a more disruptive invention might be a printer that accepts inexpensive ink in bulk, a printer without proprietary tiny little cartridges with electronics that lie about how much ink is left. I understand that we definitely need to print less, and stop using trees to print. Better quality paper can be made using flax fiber. I also think that having our own printing press is still a powerful means of spreading ideas.
I don't really print much, but when I do, it's amazing that I can take something digital and put it on a piece of paper.
The reason that's awesome is that I can then hang it on my fridge. Or take it with me in my pocket, without having to worry about electricity. Or, you know, one of the other thousand use cases where a printed page is more usable, reliable, or feasible than something turing-equivalent.
Paper and printing should die and will die. One day. But that day is not today because none of the alternatives are ready. Recently I had to work on a project that had a 500-page spec. All my screen space was taken up by code, application and command windows (and I had a very large amount of screen space). I tried keeping the specs open on a separate screen. I tried loading it to a Kindle. Nothing was fast or convenient enough. In the end, printing and binding the spec and keeping it on my desk solved the problem (I know!). The time savings for me and my team was probably worth a hundred times more than what the printing cost.
Also, beautiful concept. It takes a great mind to even think of something like this.
Exactly. Large specs are a use case I have run into a few times for printing. Anytime you have to mark up something super quick too, printing is the best method I have.
Be patient, the web is still too much of a moving target, on average people aren't saavy enough to even not fear computer interactions. I've seen people resorting to printing large spreadsheets on A3 paper and then scan through with a ruler, pencil and sticky notes. All day long (treehugger nightmare) since they're all updating the same "database" and need constant refreshed~ printed data to work on. And arguably they're 10x more productive this way than their current usage (copy/paste is jeet kune do to them) and understanding of the messy[1] computer world.
When the time is right, printing will shrink to it's minimum needed size.
[1] the computer world is a gigantic mess of papercuts, for the average human, nothing makes sense, the few time it did, it changed before they could rip the benefit.
Even if I'm a proponent of reducing paper usage and planting new trees, I can think of some cases where keeping some printed paper documents could still have some benefits even nowadays, IMHO.
* You need to travel in some places with no good access to internet or power source (as in a far far away country, or as in a local subway/underground of ill repute after 9pm),
* You thought it would be nice to delete all your original printed copies after using a JGIB2 scanner,
* You don't have the hardware or software to read your old digital copies,
* Some obtuse administration refuse your digital copies,
* Some benevolent but overly attached agencies, or some malevolent people, are trampling with your data in the cloud,
* A Carrington-class events occurs for real,
* And so on ...
but luckily, all of this never ever happen, right ? ;-)
As for the OP printer design it seems great, but when I see the 2 meters stack of paper in the illustration, I can't help but think that the printer will ran out of battery or ink before the middle of the stack.
Unfortunately, too much of human society is based on printed matter.
Take shipping a box, for example. You'd still need to print a label. There's currently no way that I know of to associate that particular box to the place it's supposed to go otherwise.
Disclaimer: I'm building http://ezsend.it to help people avoid the post office lines, and it would be a useless endeavor without printers :)
It seems as though a more practical (though perhaps more dust-prone, when empty) design would do this partially upside-down. Rather than allowing the printer to move downward though the paper, why not load the paper from the top?
One could set a full stack atop something similar to his current design using the rollers, and the finished pages could exit through the front in order to prevent them from building up below. The final roller could simply be removed and a slit added to the front such that the finished paper could exit the printer cleanly. A solid plastic sheet could then be added to catch the printed paper which folds back atop the body of the printer when it is being transported or simply not in use, perhaps to prevent the aforementioned build-up of dust.
This accomplishes Yamamoto's goal of removing the paper tray and simplifying as well as shrinking the design while avoiding the dangerous consequences of brushing past the printer while it is atop a high stack of paper.
Of course, none of this addresses a central flaw with his design. Even if two models are produced for Letter and A4 paper, there are still many other sizes in use, and there appears to be no easy way to adjust the sizes of the intake and output areas without the dreaded paper tray.
Technically you only have to adjust the size of the inlet and handle the rest in software. Since the paper would be comming down vertically, you can do mechanical centering akin to that used in industrial processes.
I like the idea, but doing so still adds a great deal of complexity to a supposedly simple design and adds a large amount to the size of the printer if one accounts for the use of legal paper.
While I wouldn't mind settling on a standard paper size, the design still leaves a great deal to be desired. It appears to be more of a gimmick than anything.
So based on this design concept I have to assume that they expect this printer to run on either batteries or wireless power of some sort. I don't mean to be too down on this as it is an interesting concept, but it annoys me when designers leave out things like power cords to make their mockup look cleaner than it actually is. It seems like a copout.
Looks fantastic, but I wonder about the tolerance wrt paper alignment. I'm picturing my office where people usually rush up to the printer, grab their printout and bump the printer.
Really interesting as an experiment in industrial design and a conversation piece. As a viable product, I have some doubt: anecdotally, when I see people printing documents, they're in something of a hurry, and keeping the pile of paper sheets aligned would be hard. If you slightly knock the printer while using it, the stack of paper may tilt to a side. And having to keep the papers aligned would become an annoyance similar to the PC LOAD LETTER of yore. Handling A4 and Letter sizes at the same time may not be possible. I don't know how being exposed in a pile would affect the humidity of the paper...
I like how it makes me think of printing as a computing process, paper as input and printed page as output, but instead of feeding the machine with input, you "feed" the input with a machine and it gives you the output. If you extend the thought, it's as if the machine disappears, and paper (the input) is processing and then outputting (printed page) itself.
Just to further your comment, the ribosome is another interesting machine that reads DNA and spits out little pieces of you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome
That was my initial thought, but in practice I don't think you'd really stack up the paper as shown in the photos. You might stack up a couple of reams, which is a lot lower than the stacks shown, and it might be possible to add some kind of collapsible/telescoping "corner plates" that would help keep the stack from shifting.
Well, I guess it depends on how you insert new pages. If you remove the machine, put new paper and put machine back then it is a stack. If you lift all papers along with the machine then it is a queue. I believe second method looks more convenient unless you have a 5 foot of paper
90 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadBut I wonder how it gets over the initial friction of lifting and pulling the paper through as it goes lower on the stack. Surely there's a limit after which, you'd need to remove the completed sheets off the top?
Bang and Olufsen sells a lot of home electronics that meet that description.
This is freaking beautiful. I hope it can work.
Pages would probably be upside down of their original unless they were fed back and forth.
All the paper would need lifted up, so there would be a limit, unless... a different idea would be the same thing along a horizontal track of papers.
I'm still liking the idea of a scanner shredder. http://designforpeople.ca/?p=215
To extend this stack design make it like an inverted shredder with a 5" shop vac hose connected to the top :P
The Gap Tray itself would still need to rest on something while it grabs the bottom sheet. There may be slightly less effort if it grabs the sheets from the side rather than from top/bottom. This way, has a shorter distance it has to pull through, but the friction may still be significant.
All this talk has really whet my appetite, though. Now I really want to see it come to life.
I love the idea of an inverted printer, where instead of paper moving through the printer, it's as if the printer is moving through the paper.
What diploma?
I'm an Industrial Designer recently graduated from the Ecole Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne (ECAL)
And a big cleanup job afterward.
[1] http://renelee.net/arc/2/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baqDk1G9zUE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPhLFxRgfQ8
Every company or process that makes me print something in 2013 makes me barf. Ever heard of web forms? Docusign? Email?
So, as beautiful as this is, it's solving a problem for 1960-1995.
Now, all I want to see in the printer innovation is some way to kill it off faster.
What better way to say "fuck you, your time is worthless" than to ask someone to print / scan / fax something.
OP has cool printer design though :)
Paper has its place; it's a fantastic archival medium.
I also still print out contracts to review them. They're easier to mark up that way, and I can focus entirely on the paper -- including quickly leafing through it, while comparing multiple pages -- in a way that I can't as easily do on the desktop.
Paper isn't dead yet; it still has the best UX available for many common use cases.
This says more about which medium you and I pay most attention to, rather than how well paper archives.
Like printing papercraft parts, big photos of anything you like, personalized trump sets, kids stories you read at bedtime. Honestly there's a lot of uses I didn't care about until there was no need to print tax forms anymore.
I think that a more disruptive invention might be a printer that accepts inexpensive ink in bulk, a printer without proprietary tiny little cartridges with electronics that lie about how much ink is left. I understand that we definitely need to print less, and stop using trees to print. Better quality paper can be made using flax fiber. I also think that having our own printing press is still a powerful means of spreading ideas.
I don't really print much, but when I do, it's amazing that I can take something digital and put it on a piece of paper.
The reason that's awesome is that I can then hang it on my fridge. Or take it with me in my pocket, without having to worry about electricity. Or, you know, one of the other thousand use cases where a printed page is more usable, reliable, or feasible than something turing-equivalent.
Paper and printing should die and will die. One day. But that day is not today because none of the alternatives are ready. Recently I had to work on a project that had a 500-page spec. All my screen space was taken up by code, application and command windows (and I had a very large amount of screen space). I tried keeping the specs open on a separate screen. I tried loading it to a Kindle. Nothing was fast or convenient enough. In the end, printing and binding the spec and keeping it on my desk solved the problem (I know!). The time savings for me and my team was probably worth a hundred times more than what the printing cost.
Also, beautiful concept. It takes a great mind to even think of something like this.
When the time is right, printing will shrink to it's minimum needed size.
[1] the computer world is a gigantic mess of papercuts, for the average human, nothing makes sense, the few time it did, it changed before they could rip the benefit.
* You need to travel in some places with no good access to internet or power source (as in a far far away country, or as in a local subway/underground of ill repute after 9pm),
* You thought it would be nice to delete all your original printed copies after using a JGIB2 scanner,
* You don't have the hardware or software to read your old digital copies,
* Some obtuse administration refuse your digital copies,
* Some benevolent but overly attached agencies, or some malevolent people, are trampling with your data in the cloud,
* A Carrington-class events occurs for real,
* And so on ...
but luckily, all of this never ever happen, right ? ;-)
As for the OP printer design it seems great, but when I see the 2 meters stack of paper in the illustration, I can't help but think that the printer will ran out of battery or ink before the middle of the stack.
Take shipping a box, for example. You'd still need to print a label. There's currently no way that I know of to associate that particular box to the place it's supposed to go otherwise.
Disclaimer: I'm building http://ezsend.it to help people avoid the post office lines, and it would be a useless endeavor without printers :)
One could set a full stack atop something similar to his current design using the rollers, and the finished pages could exit through the front in order to prevent them from building up below. The final roller could simply be removed and a slit added to the front such that the finished paper could exit the printer cleanly. A solid plastic sheet could then be added to catch the printed paper which folds back atop the body of the printer when it is being transported or simply not in use, perhaps to prevent the aforementioned build-up of dust.
This accomplishes Yamamoto's goal of removing the paper tray and simplifying as well as shrinking the design while avoiding the dangerous consequences of brushing past the printer while it is atop a high stack of paper.
Of course, none of this addresses a central flaw with his design. Even if two models are produced for Letter and A4 paper, there are still many other sizes in use, and there appears to be no easy way to adjust the sizes of the intake and output areas without the dreaded paper tray.
Another here's a CGed idea not even close to being implemented? (Which is fine except 99% of the time is because it's not possible/practical)
I know there's a claim there's a real version but not seeing pics of it? Or youtube?
I like how it makes me think of printing as a computing process, paper as input and printed page as output, but instead of feeding the machine with input, you "feed" the input with a machine and it gives you the output. If you extend the thought, it's as if the machine disappears, and paper (the input) is processing and then outputting (printed page) itself.
Indeed it does. How long was it after we discovered DNA that we discovered its 'machine', DNA polymerase? And in the end, what's more interesting?
I'd imagine the single challenge problem would be wind. If people walk by or the window is open...