Every company or process that makes me print something in 2013 makes me barf. Ever heard of web forms? Docusign? Email?
So, as beautiful as this is, it's solving a problem for 1960-1995.
Now, all I want to see in the printer innovation is some way to kill it off faster.
Paper has its place; it's a fantastic archival medium.
I also still print out contracts to review them. They're easier to mark up that way, and I can focus entirely on the paper -- including quickly leafing through it, while comparing multiple pages -- in a way that I can't as easily do on the desktop.
Paper isn't dead yet; it still has the best UX available for many common use cases.
This says more about which medium you and I pay most attention to, rather than how well paper archives.
I don't really print much, but when I do, it's amazing that I can take something digital and put it on a piece of paper.
The reason that's awesome is that I can then hang it on my fridge. Or take it with me in my pocket, without having to worry about electricity. Or, you know, one of the other thousand use cases where a printed page is more usable, reliable, or feasible than something turing-equivalent.
Paper and printing should die and will die. One day. But that day is not today because none of the alternatives are ready. Recently I had to work on a project that had a 500-page spec. All my screen space was taken up by code, application and command windows (and I had a very large amount of screen space). I tried keeping the specs open on a separate screen. I tried loading it to a Kindle. Nothing was fast or convenient enough. In the end, printing and binding the spec and keeping it on my desk solved the problem (I know!). The time savings for me and my team was probably worth a hundred times more than what the printing cost.
Also, beautiful concept. It takes a great mind to even think of something like this.
When the time is right, printing will shrink to it's minimum needed size.
[1] the computer world is a gigantic mess of papercuts, for the average human, nothing makes sense, the few time it did, it changed before they could rip the benefit.
* You need to travel in some places with no good access to internet or power source (as in a far far away country, or as in a local subway/underground of ill repute after 9pm),
* You thought it would be nice to delete all your original printed copies after using a JGIB2 scanner,
* You don't have the hardware or software to read your old digital copies,
* Some obtuse administration refuse your digital copies,
* Some benevolent but overly attached agencies, or some malevolent people, are trampling with your data in the cloud,
* A Carrington-class events occurs for real,
* And so on ...
but luckily, all of this never ever happen, right ? ;-)
As for the OP printer design it seems great, but when I see the 2 meters stack of paper in the illustration, I can't help but think that the printer will ran out of battery or ink before the middle of the stack.
I think that a more disruptive invention might be a printer that accepts inexpensive ink in bulk, a printer without proprietary tiny little cartridges with electronics that lie about how much ink is left. I understand that we definitely need to print less, and stop using trees to print. Better quality paper can be made using flax fiber. I also think that having our own printing press is still a powerful means of spreading ideas.
Like printing papercraft parts, big photos of anything you like, personalized trump sets, kids stories you read at bedtime. Honestly there's a lot of uses I didn't care about until there was no need to print tax forms anymore.
Take shipping a box, for example. You'd still need to print a label. There's currently no way that I know of to associate that particular box to the place it's supposed to go otherwise.
Disclaimer: I'm building http://ezsend.it to help people avoid the post office lines, and it would be a useless endeavor without printers :)
What better way to say "fuck you, your time is worthless" than to ask someone to print / scan / fax something.
OP has cool printer design though :)