Little Printer can now be pre-ordered

Images Little Printer1

BERG design studio's delightful Little Printer that we first blogged about in November can now be pre-ordered! You use your phone to subscribe to content sources that the Little Printer spews out as a custom miniature newspaper. It's £199.00 for the starter pack including the printer, cloud bridge, international power supplies, cables, and extra paper. Little Printer

And the more makery of you might prefer AdaFruit's "Internet of Things" DIY mini-printer kit!

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Conan Librarian

This reminds me of those small telegraph machines, the more richer clients had in their offices and homes until the 70′s. Telex machines, I think.
semiotix

The semi-DIY equivalent, Adafruit’s Internet of Things Printer, is already available, for those who don’t mind a little light soldering and Arduino tomfoolery. Total cost, including the Arduino gadgets, ~$140.
- David Pescovitz
  
  Yes! We’ve blogged that previously as well. Updated my post. Thanks for the reminder.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_YO27RCRORLE66EJXIZU27VSQTU Mulayim

Who would pay £199.00 for this?
- keithfulkerson
  
  Gomez Addams, maybe.
- Pedantic Douchebag
  
  An idiot with £199 to spare.
Daemonworks

Many, many years ago, in early days of home computers (somewhere in the tsr-80 to c64 range) i had a friend who had a tiny thermal printer sort of like this.
- Their feldspars
  
  One of these, perhaps?
  http://www.clive.nl/files/imagecache/large/PICT0065.JPG
  - David Pescovitz
    
    Or the one that went with the Texas Instruments TI-99/4?
Slobodan Tabakovich

£200 for this piece of…excrement?! You have got to be kidding me? There ARE idiots that would shell out the money? I’m changing business! From now on I’ll be selling turd in cellophane with a colorful bow. For £20 a pop, I’m sure to make a killing! AND it makes a healthy snack for your houseflies!
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  I guess you don’t like the cornbread either.
seyo

The idea is great, but they need to figure out how to do it with inkjet technology. Thermal paper is bad for your junk and probably also, at the very least indirectly, carcinogenic.

I certainly won’t be buying this, as cool as it is.
- Their feldspars
  
  There is BPA-free thermal paper.
http://www.facebook.com/brianrazencain Brian Cain

Had to be done.
- Conan Librarian
  
  Honey, I think the printers broken. It keeps printing “Mein Kampf” over and over again.
- First Last
  
  Stickler for details – the hair is parted to the wrong side.
  - semiotix
    
    Jeez, no need to be a Nazi about it.
MFGG

Y’all are missing the best part– it comes with a ‘cloud bridge’
http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty

Can this be used for general printing, or is it a closed ecosystem of special content?
Robert Cruickshank

My old eyes are no good on that small print. I want this one:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/radio-newspaper-receiver-for-home-use/
jandrese

So this is a receipt printer (an expensive one at that) hooked to some sort of “cloud service”? Why is it $200?
- C W
  
  Because there’s actually a market for people who would actually pay 200 pounds to read printed tweets, and they have a lot of money to burn.
http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

I think this is amazing, but in the wrong decade. Just seems so wasteful for a novelty, even if it is a neat idea.
Mitchell Glaser

Folks, it’s not 200 dollars, it’s 200 pounds. That’s over 300 dollars. To even suggest buying this trivial toy for that amount of money is a joke. If you’ve got that kind of money to throw away you might consider finding a good charity.
http://twitter.com/the_turtle The Turtle 

Why?
jacklaughing

I thought part of the value of the internet was in not wasting paper. I understand that the electricity simply to operate a computer is in itself not green, but this ridiculous toy seems like the kind of thing you give a Mitt Romney for his birthday. “Here, Mr guy with everything, an overpriced pointless toy that allows you to continue destroying the environment while reading the NYSE updates!”
whisper dog

What bow colours are available? Do you accept Paypal?
ffabian

I liked the idea after reading about Little printer a few month ago and waited for the pre-order but the price is a joke. I didn’t expect to get it for cheap (Berg is a design studio after all) but this is three times the amount I was willing to pay.

EDIT:
Just found this:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1953425088/mprinter-an-analog-printer-for-a-digital-world

Same thing for 80-100$
- http://profile.yahoo.com/4FDXWSJGY2DPH5M6SO2OJ5TRRI Youkai
  
  Don’t worry, it will be on Woot for 49 bucks within a year.
  - ffabian
    
    Woot does not ship outside the US. ;-(
http://www.jimdraws.com Thorzdad

I can’t figure out the purpose of this thing. A 21st century ticker-tape for RSS feeds and tweets? Why???
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Duh.
BillGlover

Now if this could print on bacon I might see the point. I could have bacon tweets with my news on toast.
Warren_Terra

This waste of space, money, and paper would have been an insanely dumb idea fifteen years ago, when people started getting “digital picture frames” plugged into the wall and halfway readable LCD screens in their pockets for far less than this abomination is priced at. It would have been mind-boggingly, inconceivably stupid five years ago, when for a fraction of the cost of this printer you could get a phone with a genuinely large, readable screen, and tablets were just coming to the popular mass market. Now, it’s become some sort of post-stupid: it now so thoroughly defies the very concept of rational assessment that the only appropriate responses are scatological or consist entirely of whimsical non-sequiturs. The market for this abomination consists entirely of the terminally hip, the clinically insane, and people who collect doomed gadgets.
Boundegar

I tried loading mine with 8-1/2 x 11, but it broked.
http://twitter.com/jclor jclor

All that paper and electricity we’ve been saving with recycling has to be used on something, I suppose.

Wait—actually, it doesn’t.
bolivar13

I bet the cost could be offset by using it to print your own parking receipts in Chicago. ~$300 would take maybe a couple of months with the ridiculous prices we get charged.
Culturedropout

PC Load Receipt! WTF is PC Load Receipt!?!?
http://mattdm.org/ Matthew Miller

The comments on the older post are closed, but several of them make me want to post this in reply. So I will do it here: http://www.richardvalentin.com/news-cycle/
http://www.dieselsweeties.com R. Stevens

I think it’s an awesome concept. It’s vinyl records for blogging. It’s comics that come pre-clipped for your refrigerator. I’m sure it’ll get cheaper.
killer_spam_robot

There’s a point at which a gadget turns from something fun and interesting into a pointless piece of trash, and it’s all about price. This is the “luxury goods” version of a receipt printer. A hobbyist may buy a receipt printer to do something fun with it, but the market for this seems to be limited to rich dudes with more money than sense. At least it’s not another fucking watch.
- penguinchris
  
  Solution: mount this printer on a watch. It prints out the time when you press the button.
  - http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BOOM27DBLMZQIJVK4BQLE7K5YA Nagurski
    
    penguinchris>Tesla>Edison
http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

Awful on so many levels.
LaGrange

To add to many other comments about what a kind of a pointless show-off gadget that costs as much as a basic workable tablet computer, this doesn’t even maintain what at least I consider the primary benefits of print newspapers.

It’s not about the unique feeling of the paper (though, geez, thermal?). It’s about the format itself. Most of what you’ll get on the net is articles each on their own unique pages. In a newspaper, you can put two articles on the same general issue side-by-site, letting things like “representing different views” actually work. You can also add a commentary from the newspaper essayist below those two (representing the view of the newspaper itself, or at least of the essayist), and a small box with some basic related fact. But this takes a lot of space, and is rather hard to pull off in a “customized” medium. There is some chance of this working on tables and laptops, but no way it would happen on an RSS ticker the size of receipt tape and.
http://www.laurabarnard.co.uk/ Laura Barnard

I’d love something like this for printing airline tickets, shopping lists, etc. The kind of thing you need paper for anyway, but saves you having to have a huge printer on your desk just to print occasional text things.
ssiess

Why? Why? Why? So wasteful, expensive, pointless, wasteful.