BERG Little Printer available to pre-order | Hacker News Reader

BERG Little Printer available to pre-order

uk-shop.bergcloud.com

47 pointspmjoyce52 comments

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...

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...).

You also need a purpose, not only good design.

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

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...

Does it really support Linux, or just Linux/ia32? The last Brother printer I had was binary only for Intel (when I dug into the drivers), which you might not think important, until you try to put it on your NAS or other server made of non-Intel (ARM, PPC, etc, etc).

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.

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!

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, it was more the small form factor that was working for me, rather than the publications aspect. Basically, I guess that I'm 100% not their target market :)

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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)

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

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

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.

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

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).

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...

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 ;)

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?

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

The iPhone can't print...

Because they're completely different things.

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.

There's many reasons why I like Little Printer, but one of those is that it upsets so many people who don't understand that the most functional way of doing things is not necessarily the most enjoyable.

People that don't understand why paper has a role in people's lives, why we reach for pens rather than tablet computers, and why while we love the internet, not everyone wants it to use it while stabbing at a glass screen all the time.

It's OK to not want one, but your anger at the product should be redirected towards making the tools you prefer, rather than deriding people for theirs.

Anger? Upset? I'm neither. I'm amused that the Hacker News crowd are so disconnected from reality as to spend £200 on something like this. A friend of mine on Twitter yesterday pointed out that £200 is enough to clothe her two kids for a year.

I'll sit back, save my £200, giggle slightly that you call a novelty printer a "tool" (for what, exactly?) and sigh that making such a pointless device gets you the adulation of the crack-addled UX design community who seem more interested in creating "delightful" user experiences than anything that actually improves the world in a meaningful or tangible way.

Sorry, you just seem very upset about it all.

I don't recognise "crack-addled UX design community" you think this belongs to. Everyone I know working on Little Printer is intelligent, thoughtful and very grounded in reality. They've spent a long time working on a product they want to make, solving difficult problems, from logistics and manufacturing through to RF and power electronics.

It's expensive, niche and unashamedly beautiful. That's OK. Not everyone has to be curing cancer 16 hours a day. I'm glad that we live in a world where people can make silly, enjoyable things too.

It's up to them to produce the product they want to make, and it's up the market to decide whether it's viable. Everyone makes a different value judgment, and that's fine.

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

Newspapers: the next growth industry.

> 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!"

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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

seriously? make her stop.

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??

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

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

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