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.

[–] bufalo1973@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This does exist and you can see it in almost every supermarket in the World: the ticket printer. And the tickets end up fading

[–] Bandicoot_Academic@lemmy.one 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ticket printers use a special thermosensitive paper.

[–] storm@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Thermal printer is the technical name.

[–] TheRealLinga@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago

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

[–] stewie3128@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I get the sense that everyone responding to this is completely missing the joke.

They mean laser printers, people.

[–] mellejwz@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] fork@endlesstalk.org 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] swab148@startrek.website 1 points 1 year ago

Pretty sure that's how my receipt printer works, but it's just one color onto specialized paper.