Abstract: It was recently suggested that black hole properties, such as the area-law behaviour of the entropy, the existence of an information horizon, thermal evaporation and a long time of information recovery are not specific to gravity. Instead, they are shared by all objects that saturate the quantum field theoretic bound on microstate degeneracy, the so-called « saturons ». In this talk I first review the essence of the saturation phenomenon and its connection to black hole physics. Then, I analyse in detail a solitonic saturon appearing in a 1+1 dimensional renormalizable quantum field theory, and calculate its evaporation rate using both a semiclassical Bogoliubov method and a fully quantum description of the bound state. I show how to recover the generic properties of saturation, comment on the correspondence with black hole entropy and radiation, and point out subtle differences between the two evaporation spectra.