this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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I wish there was a cheap simple laser engraver that could just “burn” black the surface of generic bulk printer paper. As in an inkless monochrome printer.
A bit like How to Cut, Score, and Engrave Paper With a Laser but without the need to use dedicated laser cutter.
With the explosion of interest in 3D printing, machining and laser cutters, I'm just eager to get hold of a printer like that and forever give up on liquid ink and toners of all sorts.
This does exist and you can see it in almost every supermarket in the World: the ticket printer. And the tickets end up fading
Ticket printers use a special thermosensitive paper.
Thermal printer is the technical name.
Back when I used to work as a cashier I would blow my employees mind by heating up random things with my lighter and pressing them onto the paper when nobody was looking. Had everyone thinking the printer was hacked
I get the sense that everyone responding to this is completely missing the joke.
They mean laser printers, people.
Laser printers don't burn the paper. They require toners. So it wasn't a joke unless they also didn't know how a laser printer works.
No he clearly says no ink and no toner. Toner is melted onto the paper after a laser (now mostly LEDs) heat up a drum. He's talking about burning the paper with a laser.... Which would be interesting but really hard to do where a top layer is burned black without toasting the rest of the layers.
Pretty sure that's how my receipt printer works, but it's just one color onto specialized paper.
Thermal paper. Thermal printer.
What would be interesting is if there was a way to use lasers to alter molecules in a way that permitted them to absorb all wavelengths of light. Then you really could turn things black with lasers, without having to char the paper. You just turn its molecules into weird resonance structures that are so amorphous they can find a way to absorb any photon (any photon above infrared at least; it’s got to release the energy somehow).
Maybe because they already have dot matrix printer, so that new type of printer might not be high in demand if it's on the market today.