Laser erases printed paper

Using a pencil is great when writing, since you can always erase any errors away, but when ink or powder is involved, it gets a whole lot trickier. You cannot just erase a printed paper from your inkjet or laser printer, can you? Well, technological advancements might just change that line of thinking, thanks to a new method that was discovered by an engineering team at the University of Cambridge in the UK who managed to discover how one can erase pages through the vaporizing of common toners thanks to a laser-based technique which will not cause any damage to the underlying paper at all. What you see above is a clear example, where the letters e, x and t in multiple toner colors have been laser vaporized.

Right now, Toshiba has in the market a special laser printer/copier which relies on a blue toner to erase nearly everything on a printed paper using heat treatment. What the team at Cambridge have done is this – recover a sheet of paper from any laser printed or photocopied document. No patents for this idea has been secured to date, so it remains to be seen whether such technology will see the light of day commercially or not.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: printer