The printer copier has changed vastly over the last several decades, there is no denying that. Many people reading this article probably remember their first ever printer which was probably a black and white dot matrix that was extremely loud. Moreover, just three decades ago, a laser printer would have set you back tens of thousands of rands. While revolutionary at the time, these devices were, by today’s standards, slow, printing two pages per second.
Nowadays, a small home laser printer starts from as low as a few hundred rand. We expect them to perform optimally, whether it’s a simple home printer copier or a massive production printer, we want fast output and excellent quality prints.
It’s clear that the printing industry has changed a great deal in recent decades and the progress doesn’t look like it’s slowing down any time soon. We thought we would look at some of the technology that is available today that we know is only going to become more and more popular in time. This is the future of printing:
Inkless Printers
Image credit: terinea.co.uk
Although we have cloud storage available to us, people still use a great deal of paper for printing. Rather than ignoring the environmental impact and hoping futilely that the problem will go away, Xerox is constantly working on ways to help the environment and lessen our damage to it. For this reason, they are developing an inkless printer that will make use of a light of a specific wavelength that will fade after a short period of time. This will immensely reduce ink and paper used. On prototypes printed, the print will disappear within about 24 hours and the paper can then be reused several times over.
3D Printing
No article on modern and future printing technology would be complete without a nod to 3D printing. The technology has actually been around since the 1980s, but only really became commercially available in the 2000s. Have a look at the video below for a brief explanation and demonstration on 3D printing:
If you’re looking for modern printer copiers, look no further than DocX! We are an authorised Xerox dealer, distributing machines from the company that has consistently been ahead of the curve in the printing domain for decades.
Main image credit: geeky-gadgets.com
