[I really want my browser back button back, argh!]
I wonder why people haven't done this before. The e-paper displays have always been the 'epaper' layered over circuit that creates tightly controlled electric fields. I'm guessing its something about the registration between the 'display' and the 'writer' that has fairly high tolerances. If they could license the plastic logic process to make plastic versions of the e-paper then you could have "paper" that you "print" but can recycle just by sticking it back in the input paper tray. No money selling ink though :-)
Really cool technology. Naturally, they are continuing the razor blade business model:
> When a card is placed in this imager, a simple bar code on the back of the card uniquely identifies it to the HP IonTouch system, allowing the imaging device to retrieve whatever new information needs to be placed on the card.
(also seems a little backward that I wouldn't just send the info to the printer and then put on/in the card I wanted to print/re-print.)
Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but I'd be surprised if it's totally innocuous. But, then again the research and capital investment needed to make this happen deserves to be rewarded, imo.
Hard to imagine how much they'll charge for a printer. Especially if it has no toner to run out... and each card can be printed 10,000 times.
Each card costs "several tens of cent" -- that struck me a marketing person trying a little too hard to downplay the cost. But, the die sublimation printers needed to print color on plastic badges are $10k+.
Side note, whatever happened to color e-ink displays?
Color EInk displays built using a grayscale display and color filter are already available, but sport lower contrast and a bit washed out colors. [1]
True color E Ink displays with multiple colors in each pixel were thought physically impossible, but first prototypes were shown last year. I suspect we're relatively close to a production version.
1 I'm a cofounder of a company that develops and helps develop e paper products and we sell color E Ink development kits. https://www.visionect.com
Cool! I love your products, but didn't have a use-case for that price point.
Do you have a feeling what it takes to push down color e-ink prices down to affordable (sub 1k for 32") levels? An order auf 10 Million? 100 Million? At what scale does this work?
Note that this is not a color display. If you can see the colors on the badge are already there when it goes into the printer and only the middle black and white part (black and light grey, really) changes. So this is not a color printer.
I wonder what's so innovative about this. E-ink displays consist of 2 parts. The actual display is essentially a bunch of bubbles with liquid in them. Below them is an electrical grid that can create small localized magnetic fields.
When developing these things they are often made separately for testing. The display is a card, I saw a laminated card approach, and you simply put it on top of the electrical grid. Add some tape, and the display works. This is simply someone realizing, hey, use that test process and we have a "printer" and has long been foreseen as a potential application. Issue is that the chemicals are expensive.
I think the "HP IonTouch System" that reads the bar code _is_ the printer, so that wouldn't necessarily mean a razor blade business model.
Also, the printer knowing the mapping between badge# and image to show might be more convenient. For example, consider a case where a badge shows what areas personnel is allowed to enter, with that changing per day (cleaning personnel in high security buildings, or visitors from competing companies who have meetings at multiple locations across several days for example)
In either case, you could give them a badge and let them check out and check in without human intervention.
I would expect HP will try and lease out the printers, though, charging $X per month plus $y per print.
I would guess the backward set up is to avoid mix-ups.
Maybe you have different classes of cards, like VIP, regular visitor, employee lost badge, etc. They all have different looking "shells".
So this setup makes sure the right data is printed to the right shell. Allows two different people to do the data entry and "printing" with less coordination too. No worries about FIFO, just print everything in the in bucket.
"Reprintable cards" products do exist already - just far less refined. I think the existing products are based on thermal printing? The bike parking lot I use when I ride into town uses something similar on their parking tickets http://imgur.com/a/GO9gw
“Since the only way to change information on the IonTouch cards is via our IonTouch imagers, that also adds another layer of protection, making the cards very secure, too.
If it's based on the same electrophoretic principle as regular EPDs, which seems to be the case from reading their description, then they will be affected by strong electric fields.
The concept itself is not particularly novel (this is just the electrophoretic sheet inside an EPD, with the electrodes in a separate writing head), but I think this may be the first time it's been productised for this particular application:
This is really cool technology but printing out badges doesn’t seem like a very compelling use case.
ePaper is cool because it is dynamic. Without it it’s just really expensive paper.
And I don’t think this can scale to replace paper recycling. Reuse like that to be viable would have involve mechanical feeding for example. I’m guessing this is also probably heavier and thicker. Never mind that, again, why wouldn’t you just use an eInk reader instead.
Looks pretty neat...tiny 300dpi rewritable epaper display that needs no power to retain the image. Sort of high tech etch-a-sketch.
I think they are overstating the security aspect though. You wouldn't need to recreate the tech to mimic one of these. Actual paper behind clear plastic would probably look similar if you experimented with paper color, print color, some kind of bezel effect and the plastic overlay.
While the technology is impressive, I couldn't get over the fact that I can't leave this page using my back button without trying to outpace the browser.
Why do they even direct you somewhere else?
My biggest takeaway from the article is that HP has a bunch of jerks building their marketing pages. I had to close the tab and navigate back to this entry from the front page just to complain about it.
Edit: Thank you for changing the link to a page without the redirect glitch!
The printer seems to be a cloud-managed device tied to business customer identity (note the password/code auth):
> They also added networking and cloud integration to the system, enabling the Linux-based IonTouch imager to link with customer-owned cloud databases. A retailer, for example, may recognize a customer’s gift card as it runs through the imager, immediately debit it for a purchase, and then print the new balance on the card along with a discount for a product relevant to the customer’s previous buying habits.
... imagers that are both extremely reliable and yet are “hot swappable”. “If you have any problem with an imager, our cloud backup system ensures a fast replacement. Just swap in your spare imager, authorize it with your password or code, and off you go,” Gila explains
Nice idea, but I don't see huge market potential yet. A simple label-printer (where the labels are easily detachable) would offer almost the same experience.
Also, if used for security badges, how will this prevent others from rewriting them using a separate printer?
The supermarket is going to stick with their electronic shelf labels as they are wireless updating, so no need for pulling them off the shelf to run through a printer.
There will be other niches though, one mentioned is public transport e-money/fare cards having the fare updated and promotional advertising. I can't see that happening though as this would be too slow to move through a gate compared to a NFC card. From a transport operators point of view they are unlikely to want move back towards a system where the fare gate ingests, prints and ejects a card. Have you seen the inside of a fare gate for dealing with magnetic cards? More mechanical parts than your average pinball machine, a wonder of technology but really nowhere near as reliable as an NFC reader (picture at http://www.industrytap.com/japan-railways-automated-ticket-g... and illustrative video at https://youtu.be/MIzekUVPdgY). And of course NFC is getting more availability on mobile phones so the fare card will disappear into the mobile.
And of course, there is paper, mighty cheap and comes in fancy colours :)
Give me four weeks, $5,000, and I'll find at least one viable exploit. Considering the audience here, I don't think this kind of joke is really too far fetched. "Every solution breeds new problems" as one of the Murphy's Law axioms goes.
Not saying this channel is a bad idea! I'm just the kind of guy who likes breaking things to see how they work. Criminals are almost always one step ahead because they see things in ways others might not imagine. Those errant use-cases are the ones to try to bulwark against...better when for fun than when the stakes are really high, know what I mean?
They don't seem any worse than typical badges used today. It's just replacing printed info and lamination, which is just as hackable. That's how I would hack this...print something that resembles the epaper display with suitable clearish plastic over it and something for a slight bezel effect.
These would still need whatever separate RFID or NFR tech is used to swipe and open gates, doors, etc.
Fair points! I don't disagree, and also think what we can find in common is that effort is usually a precursor to execution. As in, it's not easy to make laminated / official looking ID type things. The whole "Fake IDs" thing that is always a reasonable market - they don't have to be great, they just have to be good enough, right?
So that's the flip side, an escalation in confidence factor - oh this is new and it's not as exploitable! - is perfectly reasonable at first. I'm not trying to be sarcastic about this, but I remember reading that some crew found an exploit in pacemaker protocols (e.g. connectivity) that could be manipulated if a person had bad intentions. Who sits around and tries to figure out that kind of stuff?
Oh, right, guys like me sitting in their garage. Spiritual kin of Woz.
My kidding-but-not-really musing is that I've been an employee of 12+ different companies in my life, and I've seen how things work in practical terms.
The biggest security penetration vector that can't be digitized is human behavior, because if you act like you belong and your badge looks like you belong, yippee! Now you've got physical access, and that's 9/10s of any penetration objective. I mean, if I was a KGB agent, that's how I'd think about these things...
As I understand the product that would be like exploiting paper. In the sense that the 'badge' part is just the e-ink screen with no electronics (so the two color 'pixels' that are alternately positively and negatively charged on either hemisphere). There are lots of exploits for paper already, its called 'forgery' :-)
So if seeing is believing, like with paper, how does this new innovation "fix the glitch" as it might be called? An RFID handshake? I know that we're living in a time where manufacturing small things for reasonable cost is possible, but at some point it's Turtles All The Way Down.
I wonder why people haven't done this before. The e-paper displays have always been the 'epaper' layered over circuit that creates tightly controlled electric fields. I'm guessing its something about the registration between the 'display' and the 'writer' that has fairly high tolerances. If they could license the plastic logic process to make plastic versions of the e-paper then you could have "paper" that you "print" but can recycle just by sticking it back in the input paper tray. No money selling ink though :-)