Toaster looks and acts like a printer

Here's a neat kitchen gadget — a toaster that "prints out" toast. It allows you to feed multiple slices at once from the feeder at top, and spits out finished products from the bottom. It's a concept by Othmar Muehlebach, and it won second place at a design contest in Switzerland last month.

Artist's main page via Designboom

I'm a contributing editor here at Boing Boing. I also have a blog (TokyoMango), a book (Urawaza), and I freelance for Wired, Make, the NY Times Magazine, PRI's Studio360, etc. I'm @tokyomango on Twitter.

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Anonymous

also: more printy-toast! (courtesy old post from a design blog i contributed to until we all got lazy). http://whataboutdesign.blogspot.com/2007/06/toast-of-icff.html
vinegartom23

If I’ve run out of bread can I toast crumbs? Is there a toaster strudel setting in the driver software, or some generic settings like sticky, stale or glossy?
Anonymous

You can only use special butter and it costs $4,000 a pound.
Anonymous

“The toaster has detected you are out of bread. Please insert a new slice and hit resume.”
runninballz

I remember discussing this invention with a friend a while ago. The picture is misleading, notice the oddly perfect shaped/sliced bread. Realistically, bread from US grocers is thicker (various thicknesses) and much shapelier around the crust. We concluded that auto loading toasters would be too prone to jamming. We should have thought of making bread the size and shape of copy paper. Happy Holidays.
ROSSINDETROIT

Still no driver for Vista.
Anonymous

So does this differentiate between American bread and Australian Bread? You know – they’re different sizes (A4 vs 11×17)?
bsdnazz

I like the Dualit Conveyor Toasters :

http://www.dualit.com/products/conveyor-toasters
Anonymous

Imagine the crumbs spraying around when the toast drops and lands… I’m practical like that ;)
Moriarty

The trick is to get it to actually act like a printer, by printing/burning images and text into the bread. I have arbitrarily decided to be unimpressed until it can print a word document. (Because that would be a useful thing to do.)
- CLAVDIVS
  
  “We concluded that auto loading toasters would be too prone to jamming.”
  
  Bah-dum-TSSH!
- Mister Eppy
  
  Ahhh, Professor Moriarty,
  
  You should be investigating this wonderful thing:
  
  http://boingboing.net/2008/09/12/toaster-prints-on-br.html
Anonymous

If it really was like a printer, it would soon run out of heat, and you would have to replace the heat cartridge, and it would turn out to be very expensive …
Anonymous

Hmm… surprisingly uneaven toasting for a moving toast type toaster. Makes me suspect that it’s not real.
Anonymous

if you want to write on your toast, you could go for this:
http://www.yankodesign.com/2007/09/06/honey-i-left-it-on-the-toast/
Anonymous

It’s a concept that should stay a concept. Who needs cold bread that’s got a brown stain on each side? Nobody who wants toast.
TheEvilJeremy

It looks awesome… but if it actually “acts like a printer”, then I imagine that any time I really needed a piece of toast, it would come at the expense of 45 minutes of troubleshooting nebulous/unspecified errors, and several ruined pieces of bread.
- Anonymous
  
  It probably won’t butter up, but I bet it’ll jam up!
  
  Mind you, when you’re having problems, you can always hold down the right buttons when you turn it on, so you can print out a piece of test toast!
Anonymous

Would be much more cool if it could print out designs on the toast by varying the heat level as the toast went through the “printer”
zikzak

Needs butter cartridge.
simonbarsinister

“PC LOAD WHEAT”, WHAT THE F* DOES THAT MEAN?!
max_supernova

I want one that will toast text that I want on the bread.

I’d have it put my GCal Reminders on my breakfast.
Anonymous

The friction from each slice sitting against each other will not allow them to slide down into the toaster (Bread is not smooth like sheets of paper. Also – crumbs issue. Also – my toaster makes up to 4 slices at a time.
I could go on . . .
Anonymous

Great,
Except only the back end of the toast will still be warm when it is finished. The first end out will already be cold!

Unless it is super fast ;)

Also, looks a bit like the toasters i saw in a youth hostel once.
warreno

It’s great until you run out of toner, and it’s a real improvement over the old tractor-feed model.
Anonymous

I see it has brightness and contrast controls. Does it do duplex printing? Do you need a separate cartridge for bagels?
- SayBlade
Anonymous

I like that it looks like a googly-eyed dude wearing a hat. But I’m a weird guy. And that would mean the toast is coming out of his neck, which is a little gross.
Cactaur

Just the thing to make some miraculous Jesus image toast.
Anonymous

If it’s anything like printers I’ve dealt with, you’ll be out of butter every time you go to use it, and you’ll need to have several slices loaded before it’ll realize there are any there. Then it’ll suck in two slices at once, rip them up, and if you’re lucky the pieces might come out the other side.
Itsumishi

If the bottom tray had a heating element in it and perhaps some sides this would be very handy when cooking food for multiple people that require toast (i.e. a delicious cooked breakfast).

You’d just load up the number of pieces of bread and leave it rather than keep loading more toast while you’re frantically trying to make sure those sautÃ©ed mushrooms don’t burn.
arkizzle / Moderator

Here’s Electrolux’s prototype from last year..

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/09/12/scan-toaster-bread-p.html
Symphonix

I love it, but according to the product page it doesn’t support PCL6 or crumpets.
arkizzle / Moderator

Oh wait.. this one doesn’t print images or text. It’s the loading mechanism that’s new.
mcmikedermott

…And don’t get me started on “Jam”