BERG Little Printer available to pre-order

http://uk-shop.bergcloud.com/

by pmjoyce • 14 years ago

47 52 14 years ago

uk-shop.bergcloud.com

ryan_s• 14 years ago

You know, my mom still prints 80% of her emails. Maybe she needs this.

beedogs• 14 years ago

seriously? make her stop.

samarudge• 14 years ago

Just ordered one. Completely useless, expensive but ridiculously cool. Who's going to be the first to write a Hacker News publisher for it?

one-man-bucket• 14 years ago

The €210 price tag is a bit too steep for me. I would have bought one for €60.

agumonkey• 14 years ago

Don't laugh, I read the shipping fees as the total price. I thought it was adequate.

lazyatom• 14 years ago

If you're interested in getting involved in tiny printers, but £200 is more than you can afford, then you can always make your own: http://gofreerange.com/hello-printer

osener2• 14 years ago

This page highlights a bunch of cool use cases for a gadget like this, quick sudoku puzzles, weather, maps, a few twitter post etc. It would be nice to have a daily sheet containing these printed out every morning for the bus, especially if you don't own a smartphone.

highace• 14 years ago

Hold on... so we're going back to printing things out again, things that are easily accessible on our phones or computers? Really? I don't quite understand why anyone would want this apart from the gimmick factor.

pivo• 14 years ago

I occasionally need to print things, for example a train ticket last weekend that needed to be scanned and wouldn't scan on my phone. This might be good for me if it were less expensive.

threedaymonk• 14 years ago

I'm not sure it would help, as most print-at-home train tickets are designed for A4: the bar codes wouldn't even be readable if scaled down to receipt paper size.

If space isn't a concern, laser printers are now very cheap. Unlike inkjets, they don't dry out, and if you're only an occasional user you may never need to refill the toner. Mine cost about a fifth of the price of a Little Printer.

mootothemax3• 14 years ago

I don't quite understand why anyone would want this apart from the gimmick factor

I can buy tickets for the local tram/busses/trains on my phone. It's a great service that works close to flawlessly. If I could print off tickets at home though, and thus not rely on a network connection (to buy the tickets) and battery life, I'd do so in a heartbeat.

I think there are plenty of uses for small things like this. Personally, it's too expensive for me to use for small fun things like this, but I imagine other people will have more useful ideas that'll make it worth the money.

unwind• 14 years ago

But that kind of usage, which sounds pretty much exactly how you'd use a desktop printer, is not at all what they seem to be selling. Their idea is that you should use their cloudy goodness to define a bunch of subscriptions to pre-curated "publications", which is what get printed on a schedule. So you could probably get your daily Wired synopsis in the morning, on paper. Or something.

osener2• 14 years ago

I don't have a smartphone and I'd love the ability to print the ingredients for a recipe in seconds before I go shopping (unfortunately this products seems to be well over my price range).

nasmorn• 14 years ago

If it was in your price range you would already have a smart phone.

njharman• 14 years ago

Yeah, I don't get it either (actually I get what it is, hipster/"art"/electronic kitsch, just don't get why) Reminds me of grandparents who printed out emails back in the 90's. But even they don't do that anymore.

bruceboughton• 14 years ago

Why does this need its own wifi bridge? This is supposed to be a cool gadget, yet it can't even use standard wifi?

moe2• 14 years ago

Erm. $300 bucks for a thermal printer, seriously?

Those can be had for $50 on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/High-speed-Receipt-Thermal-Printer-Bla...

Tichy4• 14 years ago

Just goes to show again that you can ask for a healthy markup for good design (well if they succeed it goes to show again...).

miahi• 14 years ago

You also need a purpose, not only good design.

bockris• 14 years ago

Also https://www.adafruit.com/products/597 if you want to have a more generic case to build around.

moe2• 14 years ago

And if you want something that "just works" then you can't go wrong with:

http://www.amazon.com/Brother-QL-570-Professional-Label-Prin...

$90 bucks (3x cheaper than the BERG), automatically cuts the labels, very fast, linux-support...

Tichy4• 14 years ago

I guess a Raspberry Pi could be perfect for connecting such a printer to the cloud.

Wonder if the BERG cloud will be "open" and available to other consumers, too.

mootothemax3• 14 years ago

Shame, this looks very fun, but for fun purchases, my "I'll buy that right now!" price limit is usually around the 50 GBP mark. 200 GBP can buy me too much stuff that is less "just for fun" and more genuinely useful, not to mention saving towards still more expensive items.

That said, I don't doubt that there are some people that will a) find this genuinely useful and b) can therefore justify the price.

Best of luck!

AkThhhpppt2• 14 years ago

All of you talking about this as a printer appear to have missed the point very slightly. This isn't a general purpose printer, its more like a personalized newspaper producer.

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6nVVdwa3bs

smackfu• 14 years ago

Newspapers: the next growth industry.

tjic• 14 years ago

> All of you talking about this as a printer appear to have missed the point very slightly. This isn't a general purpose printer, its more like a personalized newspaper producer.

I think people are GETTING the point: "that stuff you prefer to view on a screen? Now you can pay a lot of money to get it in a less useful form-factor: paper!"

GFischer• 14 years ago

Paper is nice, it's disposable, shareable, etc :) .

However, the sticking point is the "lot of money" part, as many have pointed out, since tablets became mainstream it will have to compete with them.

adestefan• 14 years ago

Who wants to read a newspaper on a strip of thermal paper? That's what I don't get about this; the resulting form factor is just laughable.

bio4m• 14 years ago

Its far too expensive for what it does. in the UK its £200 + shipping, while you can buy a brand new 7" tablet (the Nexus 7) for £159 + shipping.

And i daresay you'll get much more use out of a tablet than a small printer. This ones DOA.

unless the price drops to around £19.99 it will never see any traction. (Also no mention is made of how much the replacement paper rolls will cost; since its so dependent on consumables that's a glaring omission on their part)

Tichy4• 14 years ago

Hm, it is nonsense, but I can imagine all sorts of random fun happening. One idea: what if upon press of a button, I could get a printout of the next task on my TODO list? (I know this is probably not what the BERG cloud does, just thinking about little printers in general).

AkThhhpppt2• 14 years ago

It might be possible: it doesn't cost anything to publish to the Little Printer, anyway. Publishing app specification dox here http://www.bergcloud.com/download/Little_Printer_Publication...

vitovito• 14 years ago

With this announcement, might be a good time to review my design analysis of the BERG Little Printer. I compared it to a related, unreleased "alternative printer" project I designed several years ago:

http://vitor.io/little-printer-design-analysis

wazoox• 14 years ago

It fails to reveal what problem it solves; it even fails to reveal what use it could be. The marketing here is beyond terrible, and make it looks like a useless, expensive gadget.

(Hint: As many, I have way too many gadgets and stuff around; I need another gadget to be seriously useful to even consider the possibility of acquiring it).

cosmotron• 14 years ago

Sadly, I couldn't find a link on their site to a video outlining a few of its uses, but one does exist!

http://vimeo.com/32796535

BjornW• 14 years ago

I like the aesthetics of the hardware, but don't like the environmental impact this will make.

In my personal opinion design should strive to solve problems or answer hard to answer questions like 'how can I print without the environmental impact printing has had for quite some time' instead of creating aesthetically pleasing toys.

For this same reason I'm in dubio about 3D printing & fablabs in general. Unless we find a way to re-use materials we're just creating more junk and roadside litter.

Maybe BERG should rethink Little Printer and let it output eatable paper so we can use the freshly printed news as part of our breakfast ;)

thedangler• 14 years ago

I came here to complain about the price. Looks like I don't have to. I still think it is a nifty idea. My GF wants one for printing off recipes but now that we know the price, that isn't going to happen.

tommorris3• 14 years ago

BERG Little Printer with UK postage and packing: £205.50

16Gb iPhone 4S on Vodafone's cheapest contract (£26): £219.

Can someone explain why anyone would buy this thing?

jawr• 14 years ago

I think you missed the additional £624 brought about by the 24 month contract.

Tichy4• 14 years ago

The iPhone can't print...

scraplab3• 14 years ago

Because they're completely different things.

tommorris3• 14 years ago

Sure. But the use case of the Little Printer is to get a little daily digest of interesting and useful things you can take with you. That already exists in the form of smartphones.

danieldrehmer• 14 years ago

It would be nice if one could place this in one's toilet and if the paper it prints on was toilet paper

stcredzero• 14 years ago

We're back to "ticker tape." (Except thermal printers have little Steampunk aesthetic value.)

yitchelle• 14 years ago

I don't understand what this printer is trying to solve, or prove, or to showcase. I mean the webshop is nice, perhaps it is a showcase for their webshop?

Give me a clue??

temas• 14 years ago

Their price point seems a bit crazy, my brother just started doing a project in a similar vein. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1953425088/mprinter-an-a...

arscan• 14 years ago

Looks cool. Is your brothers project based on this: http://gofreerange.com/hello-printer ?

droob• 14 years ago

Whimsy goes a long way. People own plenty of things with dubious utility.

BERG Little Printer available to pre-order

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