This handheld printer concept reduces waste by printing on any paper size

If you could print on any size of paper at any time, you can probably help cut down on the number of trees that have to be cut down needlessly.

We live in a world that revolves around content stored in digital form, but we also still live in a world that exists in the physical and material realm. It is still common to give physical forms of digital files, sometimes more often than should be. This means that the demand for printed pages will not disappear anytime soon. Printing on paper can also be a major source of waste. This is especially true when you take into account the various paper sizes used around the globe. Printing is inevitable. We should try our best to minimize it. This is the ideal printer’s proposal.

Designer: Alonso Bastos Duran

Of course, all printers these days can support a range of paper sizes, but those naturally require that you have a supply of those materials. This is not a big problem if you print only in one size, but if you have to print something smaller you will need to trim and discard the extra areas. This leads to waste which in turn, will worsen the global deforestation situation. Since it’s not really possible to just stop printing altogether, the next best thing is to be as flexible as possible.

The Printall concept allows you to adjust your printer’s printout for any size paper. This is possible because it doesn’t function exactly the same as regular printers. You don’t have to feed it paper because it doesn’t actually have to apply ink on it like you would on a normal inkjet printer.

Instead, the printer uses Xerography, which basically uses electricity to charge black or colored powder so that they stick to surfaces. Also known as electrophotography, the dry copying technique offers a bit more flexibility, at least in what you can print on. That’s what makes Printall special because it could print on any compatible material, including things that might not be paper. Printing on concrete and steel is possible with the correct materials. In context, however, it simply means you can accommodate the biggest and the smallest printer sizes with no exception.

Without the restrictions of physical paper, the printer can also break free of having to be tethered to a single location. Printall was designed to be mobile and portable, so you can print on any surface that supports the same xerographic technology. That said, it does seem like you will need to be the one that guides the printer over the paper or surface, so it’s not exactly certain how accurate it will be. It’s just light. You can also simply step back and project the image onto “paper” to see it magically appearing.