Comment by bryogenic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryogenic | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe the way they are looking at it is like this:

    Top Paper
    1 ---------
    Gap Tray
    2 ---------
    Bottom Paper

Paper would be collected from bottom using standard scanner/paper style paper grabbing, scanned or printed to and placed in Gap Tray. Gap tray and entire top paper stack need lifted and placed back on support layer 1.

Pages would probably be upside down of their original unless they were fed back and forth.

All the paper would need lifted up, so there would be a limit, unless... a different idea would be the same thing along a horizontal track of papers.

I'm still liking the idea of a scanner shredder. http://designforpeople.ca/?p=215

To extend this stack design make it like an inverted shredder with a 5" shop vac hose connected to the top :P

Clever! A scanner that digitizes text as it destroys it can see some good use in a disposal/archival location.

The Gap Tray itself would still need to rest on something while it grabs the bottom sheet. There may be slightly less effort if it grabs the sheets from the side rather than from top/bottom. This way, has a shorter distance it has to pull through, but the friction may still be significant.

All this talk has really whet my appetite, though. Now I really want to see it come to life.

Reminds me of Vinge's "Rainbow's End", there was a device which shredded whole books, then sucked the confetti through a hose that had tiny cameras in the walls, and they stitched scans of the original books together in software.

Clever until the scanner part breaks but the shredder keeps shredding.

The more interesting question is how is it going to grab last pages from the table. "My printer was out of paper and dropped from the table again!"

Wait...what happens if there's a paper jam halfway through scanshredding?

What about the weight on the printer when printing a large document?

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