Xerox shows off "erasable paper," hopes to make it available next year

The folks at Xerox has been working on their "erasable paper" idea for some time now, but it looks like they've been making some real progress as of late, with them now even going so far as to say that they hope to have an actual product available sometime next year. The paper itself, however, appears to still use the same basic technology they've been working on all along -- namely, a coating of photosensitive chemicals that turn white when hit by ultraviolet light or react to product text when scanned specific wavelength of light. The text can then be erased on command by feeding it through a special printer, or left to disappear on its own over a period of 24 hours. On the downside, the paper is apparently useless if it's been folded or wrinkled, or written on with a pen. No word on an expected price for the paper or printer just yet, unfortunately, but Xerox seems to be betting that the savings in paper (and consequential environmental benefits) will be enough to offset whatever premium they'll likely cost.

[Via The Inquirer, image courtesy of Xerox / Greig Reekie]

[nick @ May 5th 2008 11:52AM]

And next....erasable toilet paper...

[joe23521 @ May 5th 2008 1:14PM]

It'd be difficult to avoid folding and wrinkling though.

[GreezyG @ May 5th 2008 11:52AM]

Hmm... Cool yes, practical applications?

[Blaine Oliver @ May 5th 2008 11:56AM]

You can mount your prized autograph, and in a day its gone?

[tom @ May 5th 2008 12:08PM]

Confidential information left on the table

[EM @ May 5th 2008 2:50PM]

This message will self destruct in 10... 9... 8...

[JAmerican @ May 5th 2008 6:19PM]

They already invented this. Its called department store receipts!

[Shanon Fernald @ May 5th 2008 11:57AM]

but does it fit in a manila envelope?

[fred @ May 5th 2008 11:58AM]

Just wait until they invent the eraser.

Soon movable type will be on the horizon.

[Johan S @ May 5th 2008 11:58AM]

"The text can then be erased on command by feeding it through a special printer, or left to disappear on its own over a period of 24 hours"

Through a special printer?

Photocopier ink melts when heated. So you can do this with photocopied (and presumably laser printed) paper by sending it back through the photocopier a few cycles (blank photocopying).

Uh they should do show about that on mythbusters.

[Rusty @ May 5th 2008 2:06PM]

You can't just run it back through a photocopier to "erase it".
Copier toner is mostly plastic, with carbon and a couple other ingredients to provide color & to stabilize it. The fixing (fuser) section works with two things. Heat & pressure. The heat from the fuser rollers melts the toner, and then the pressure between the upper fuser roller (usually Teflon coated aluminum) and the pressure roller (rubber silicone) fixes the melted toner into the fibers of the paper. Simply running it back through blank won't do anything but waste time & energy. You would need a completely different way to strip the toner off. Ricoh a few years ago fooled around with a method of stripping the toner from paper by using a wet chemical agent.
You run the paper through a special "bath" which would loosen the toner particals, but, it proved too expensive and time consuming to take it any farther than research.
The problem Xerox might have with this device are huge.
1. Unless they are going to market it with a special copier, I don't see it doing much since this paper must be a special type, with a lot of requirements to get it to go through a copier.
2. I can't see this being able to be duplexed (two sided copying), since this is a "UV" treatable paper, you would have to have some way to separate the two sides of paper.
3. The cost involved would prohibit this from the bulk of consumers.
I've been in the repair side of office machines for almost 30 years.
Just in the last few have machine manufacturers been able to offer machines that reliably able to feed recycle paper, I can't imagine this
stuff going through a typical office machine.

[Jonathan @ May 5th 2008 12:02PM]

Couldn't they just make pens with the same technology that the printer uses to write on them? That way you could print from the printer, mark it up with your special pen, and then re-use it all the next day.

[Mike @ May 5th 2008 12:24PM]

The issue with regular pens is that

1.) They don't disappear in 24 hours
2.) The can dent/scratch the coating on the paper which inhibits its own natural erasing ability
3.) They indent the paper, so that even if the ink is gone, you can still tell what has been written. This technique is seen fairly commonly because it works not just on the original sheet, but in a notepad or notebook, you can tell what was written on a page that has been removed.

Since this seems to be specifically for security purposes (any other reason for 24 hour disappear time?), those issues are ones that would likely need to be resolved.

[webon @ May 5th 2008 12:04PM]

wouldn't it be easier to use graphite?

and then plainly erase it with gum?

[OX4 @ May 5th 2008 12:12PM]

So it's paper, but you can't fold, wrinkle, or write on it. Thanks Xerox!

[UKNigel @ May 5th 2008 12:37PM]

Paper that can't be made into paper airplanes is not worthy of existence.

[spyder91 @ May 5th 2008 2:40PM]

I'm pretty sure you can still fold it...

The article says:

"There is one drawback: it is not capable of erasing pen doodles or unfolding paper aeroplanes."

That would mean it cannot unfold itself, but not that it cannot be folded.

[tekdroid @ May 5th 2008 12:13PM]

Xerox, i've wanted erasable paper for some time. Erasing done on-the-fly as its fed through a 'printer' automagically (at the same time it's printed).

Please wake me and my neighbourhood when you complete this noble mission. Resolution must be paper-like. Resilience of paper must be high. I can live with it not allowed to be creased but it has to be able to be rolled up. This would replace a good 80% of the paper we use now with very short-term uses.

Also, waiting for erasable photo paper filled with millions of colours. Thank you.

[happy_penguin @ May 5th 2008 12:30PM]

:D :D :D

[happy_penguin @ May 5th 2008 12:31PM]

Sorry that was at the first post. :D :D

[Farris @ May 5th 2008 12:31PM]

I have already invented erasable paper that is unerasable once written on with pen.

It's called "Paper."

[sinjinn @ May 5th 2008 12:47PM]

i dont thnk you invented it . your joke sucks too.

[Joshua @ May 5th 2008 1:00PM]

Hooray!! The Segway of Paper is here!! But in all seriousness. Does it really make sense to innovate a commodity with technology that is LESS usable than the original product? This makes for an interesting business model. Let's try it on. . .

1. New brand of car that changes color to suit your mood, but does not use wheels. Instead it just sits in your driveway.
2. An ultraslim phone that has done away with that pesky dial pad, but takes excellent pictures. Besides, no one actually MAKES phone calls anymore.
3. A sleek and sexily designed outdoor trash can that does not have any way of putting the trash in it. Instead you put the trash on the ground and the wind blows it away. This way, you can save money on waste management.

Brilliant!!

[Johan S @ May 5th 2008 12:39PM]

Actually something like the kindle, but without the awful form factor .. if it had a touch screen with a special rapid page scroller that would be cool. It should enable very fast page scrolling using a touch sensitive pad (scroll wheel?) or display UI (virtual horizontal slider?). If they do it without flicker and very smooth, that would probably replace paper and also books for me.

[sinjinn @ May 5th 2008 12:50PM]

ok. well thry already have those. they are called tablet pc's. so now you MUST go buy one.

[Ryan Waddell @ May 5th 2008 1:06PM]

This is kinda cool. It'd come in handy at my office, with the amount of crap that we print out, for meetings, etc, that then gets chucked into the recycling bin an hour later. Just have to remember to only use that printer for stuff that you don't want to keep for longer than a day.

[JamesR @ May 5th 2008 1:17PM]

This is a very good application for the product. I print out many documents for meetings only to have them sit ignored on my desk shorty there after. Would be great to be able to reprint on the same page in a few days for the next set of meetings.

[iomatic @ May 13th 2008 3:00AM]

Yup.

Clueless-comment-kiddies (cCOKs) apparently only think about paper use in detention, and don't seem to think of paper use in business.

[Ian @ May 5th 2008 2:10PM]

wow thats the first good idea ive heard for this product.

[konshuss @ May 5th 2008 1:35PM]

this is perfect for top secret, high priority, classified, extremely improtant information... that people just leave laying around.

[BigD145 @ May 5th 2008 2:38PM]

McCain will love this stuff. He usually forgets what he's said in his speeches after 24 hours, anyway.

[NxP3 @ May 5th 2008 2:39PM]

I can see it now. Kids with new excueses...."What, my homework is blank? I must have accidently did my work on Xerox paper"

Seriously...I'm thinking and thinking....what good is paper that erases itself in 24 hours or on command? On top of misplacing your important notes, now you have to wonder if you didn't loose your mind because your notes erased itself?

[NxP3 @ May 5th 2008 3:46PM]

I don't know if it will use regular toner. I mean toner just doesn't disappear into thin air. They must require special toner. And how many times can you put paper into a printer...2 or 3 times and it'll start causing printer jam.

[Bizam! @ May 5th 2008 2:45PM]

unfortunateyl, I don't think this will see the light of day in an office....

[A. Stein @ May 5th 2008 2:53PM]

As for practical uses, I personally hate it when the scanner/printer/fax in my office prints out a sheet telling me a fax was successful/unsuccessful every time I send something, even if it's not that important. I usually get around this by re-feeding the paper with the pass/fail message on it, so that now it's covered in ink. I honestly only put in a new sheet when someone calls and tells me ahead of time they're faxing something. Otherwise I assume it's a junk fax anyway. It'd be great if it would just erase itself over time.

[Amerist @ May 5th 2008 3:08PM]

They should make a fax that sends you an email confirmation when the fax goes through instead of wasting a sheet of paper.

[Amerist @ May 5th 2008 3:06PM]

"creating the future today" ... with yesterday's XEROX logo on it.

Plusses: No more toner, built-in convenient way to destroy documents without needing to shred. (helpful for Enron and MCI types)
Minuses: Special Paper. (hey, if they can't sell more toner, at least they can make expensive paper) & If you think Xerox copiers jammed a lot before, you're in for a whole other level of frustration once you start feeding in pages that have already been been printed on and man-handled.

I suppose they'll sideways innovate anything to keep them in the copier business.

[macserv @ May 6th 2008 8:27PM]

I, for one, am glad to see that not everyone in the company is thrilled with the trashing of their 50-year-old brand. Long live the old Xerox logo!

[konshuss @ May 5th 2008 3:26PM]

Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Your mission, Jim, should you choose to accept it... as always should any member of your imf force be caught or killed, the secretary will dissavow all knowledge of your actions. This piece of paper will erase itself in... eh, about a day.

[Garst @ May 5th 2008 3:44PM]

Here's a problem with this:

"Why weren't you at the meeting this morning? Didn't you get the memo?"

"Memo? No. But I'm getting tired of people leaving random yellow pieces of paper! They keep cluttering up my memo box!"

[webon @ May 5th 2008 4:54PM]

Wait, I just thought bout some useful application for this.

Newspapers you download the news, you print it to go, 24hours later you reprint it again. we could save millions of trees that way

wait even better
you pay a subscription to the local newspaper cheaper than usual all you have to do is bring your erased newspaper and feed it to the printer

cool right?

[m-p{3} @ May 5th 2008 5:52PM]

I see so much a company getting in trouble by printing their financial income reports on this...

[Devon @ May 5th 2008 6:07PM]

Does this come with spell check? unfortunateyl, probably not...

[hendrix @ May 5th 2008 8:01PM]

Perfect for Election Fraud.