this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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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).