*NEWS*XEROX:NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T

[Anonymous]

Xerox :Now you see it, now you don’t
Xerox
is working on a chemical process that would allow its copiers to
recycle paper documents, possibly an unlimited number of times.
In
most modern offices, paper increasingly is used as a medium of display
rather than of storage, according to Brinda Dalal, an anthropologist at
the Palo Alto Research Center where she and the Xerox chemists are
developing an “erasable paper” system.Of the 1,200 pages the average
office worker prints per month, 44.5 percent are for daily use –
assignments, drafts or e-mail. In Dalal’s research into the waste
produced by office workers, she found that 21 percent of black-and-
white copier documents were returned to the recycling bin on the same
day they were produced.Documents are stored on central servers and
personal computers and printed only as needed for meetings, editing or
reviewing information.Her research is part of a three-year- old
technology development effort to design an add-on system for an office
copier to produce “transient documents” that can be easily reused. The
researchers now have a prototype system that will produce documents on
a specially coated paper with a light yellow tint. So far, the process
works without toner and produces a low-resolution document that appears
to be printed with purple ink.The printed information “disappears”
within 16 hours. The documents can be reused more quickly by simply
placing them back in the copier paper tray.The researchers said that
individual pieces of paper had been printed upon as many as 50 times,
and the only current limit in the process appears to be stamina of
paper.”People really like paper,” said Eric Shrader, a computer
scientist who is area manager for printing systems at the Hardware
Systems Laboratory of the research center, which is known as PARC.
“They like the way it feels.”The project is still very much in a
laboratory phase, he said. The researchers are trying to refine the
process, both to increase contrast and to extend control over the life
span of the print process.

During the 1990s, the Japanese office
equipment maker Ricoh developed a commercial system that made it
possible to remove toner from paper to make recycling possible, Shrader
said. It was possible to recycle individual pieces of paper up to 10
times, according to Ricoh, but that system no longer is commercially
available.Xerox has not yet decided whether to commercialize its
technology, Shrader said. But the goal of the research is to create a
system in which the specially coated paper initially costs two to three
times what standard copier paper costs, but that the total cost of the
system is substantially less because the special paper is reused
repeatedly, he said.The company said that the precise nature of the
technology was proprietary and that Xerox had applied for a number of
related patents covering the invention. The researchers describe the
invention as being based on compounds that can change color when they
absorb a certain wavelength of light, but which gradually can revert to
their original appearance. The compounds currently self-erase in about
16 to 24 hours, or can be erased immediately when heated.The challenge
Xerox faces is to find a market for a new paper printing technology in
an era when information increasingly is being viewed and read on
electronic displays of all types.For example, PARC has done extensive
research on the idea of “electronic paper.” Its researchers separately
developed an “electronic reusable paper” system called Gyricon. A
Gyricon sheet is a thin layer of transparent plastic composed of small
beads similar to toner particles. The beads are “bichromal,” with light
and dark sides. When a voltage is applied at different positions on the
sheet, the beads rotate to create an image. Xerox tried unsuccessfully
to commercialize the technology.The Sony Reader, introduced this year,
is based on a similar technology developed by the E Ink Corporation of
Cambridge, Massachusetts.”I worry that this would be like coming out
with Super 8 just before the video camera,” said Paul Saffo, a
researcher in Silicon Valley who has been a consultant to Xerox, said,
referring to a film format. “This would have been a bigger deal 10
years ago. These days there’s so much getting read online, I wonder if
time hasn’t passed this by.

[Author]

December 6, 2006 at 11:32 AM