If this Kickstarter project wants to teach us one thing, it’s that printers don’t have to take up a room in order to make high-quality prints. In fact, a pocket-sized works equally fine!
Remember iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaning robot, which worked its way on the entire surface of a room without any help? Israeli startup ZUtA Labs must have thought that it can use the same working principle for a pocket printer that once placed on a sheet of paper starts printing whatever data it received wirelessly via Bluetooth from smartphones, tablets and PCs. There are many benefits to such a printer, but the most important of them all must be the ability to print on paper of all sizes.
At first, people used USB cables to connect printers to their computers, and in the majority of the cases, these cables weren’t even shipped with the printer. In the early days of the multifunctionals, the only wireless connection that could have been established was via IrDA (Infrared Data Association). The fact that now printers are equipped with WiFi and Bluetooth sensors is really life-altering for anyone hating cables. The next step in the evolution of printers would be to make them extremely portable, and this Mini Mobile Robotic Printer seems to be just that and more.
The Mini Mobile Robotic Printer is by no means perfect. The manufacturers claim that the first version will only print in grayscale, future versions probably being capable of printing in color. Moreover, the printer’s battery (as it doesn’t use solar power, you know…) lasts for about an hour, which is certainly not enough to print 1,000 pages. According to ZUta Labs, that’s how much it takes to finish the ink contained by the printer. There has been no word on how much the cartridges will cost, and personally I’m afraid to ask, since most companies sell their consumables for more money than the main product.
As mentioned earlier, the developers of this pocket printer have launched a campaign on Kickstarter, where they hope to reach $400K in order to manufacture the product. People have backed the project with less than 10% of that till now, but considering that there are 29 more days to go, it would be wrong to jump to conclusions. For early birds, the Mars Black version costs $180 while, for some odd reason, the Titanium White one is $20 more. After those spots will all be taken, the rest of the people can secure a Mini Mobile Robotic Printer for themselves for $200 and $220, respectively.
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