Ricoh's latest techno-invention: Clickable paper

At Premier Copier Solutions we are full supporters of Ricoh. We believe in their product and we believe in their technology. For the past few months, Premier has followed Ricoh on their latest techno-invention: Clickable Paper. Developed in the USA, Ricoh announced that the application has successfully completed Stage One in the UK.

So what is Clickable Paper? It is a cross media application that enables printed materials to be scanned and read it through smartphones or tablets. Available for iPhone or Android, there are many videos online that show how the app works. After reading Ricoh’s press release we were still a little unsure about the reading material that is provided once the printed version had been scanned. Ricoh doesn’t specify this but, following our own research, we believe that once the printed article has been scanned other related content will appear. Rather than the exact article appearing online, similar features based on the keywords will. We believe Ricoh could make the process much clearer, as we think it offers the reader a much wider variety of information on various social platforms than is currently described.

Following our research; using an iPhone we downloaded the free Clickable Paper app from the App Store; we are quite excited about experimenting with this app for ourselves and were a little disappointed with Stage One of the UK launch. Understanding that this is only Stage One and there are improvements to come, it wasn’t the clean design shown in the videos. The visual effect of the app seemed quite amateur with an unappealing design and unrefined text. Putting the design to one side, the technology didn’t seem to work either. We tried various printed materials but the camera function couldn’t recognise anything.

We think that this technology has a lot of potential and can bring a fresh approach to the industry of printing and copying, but Ricoh’s Clickable Paper still has a few more stages to go until it can be brought to the general public. We think it would be great if this technology could be developed in a smaller city like Cardiff. It would have the benefit of testing on a digitally enhanced, thriving city without swamping the application.