I don't know if you've seen the ads in your market (I suppose it depends on whether or not Chase has banks in your area), but there's a TV spot showing the new Chase ATM's that suck in bills and checks without envelopes and will even print pictures of them on your receipt. My local branch just got one.
With the Fall Affair coming up, I'm getting registrations in now, and most are checks. So I rolled up with four checks, fed them to the machine, and about 20 seconds later, it figured out the value of each check and added them together. Of course, I didn't trust it, so I viewed the pictures of each by pushing a button on the screen. Sure enough, it got them all right. Awesome. It says that it can handle up to 30 checks at a time. I had a business sized check too from one of the ad reps, but I didn't realize that I could do the entire stack until after I did that one (RTFM!), but I assume it could handle the different sizes.
Does anyone remember ATM's that had a little narrow horizontal window, and behind it, there was a wheel that spun to the right message for you to read? No CRT's, let alone LCD touch screens. By the time I was old enough to have a bank account, they did have those green or amber CRT screens in the Diebold machines, and it seems like those lasted for at least ten years.
It's cool that the way we interact with machines is getting to a point where it's only limited by our imagination.
These fancy machines are one of the reasons I switched from my local credit union to Bank of America. They have these ATMs all over the place around here, and I was sick of operating around the credit unions hours to deposit checks conveniently. Fuck that envelope shit.
The first time I discovered PNC had those in Pittsburgh, I was making a deposit with a check and noticed it gave me the option for "No Envelope". I wasn't expecting it to spit back a scanned image of the check on the receipt, but found it quite cool.
I can remember the old Diebold CRTs, complete with burn-in, all over the place. Don't recall ever seeing the "spinning wheel" models...