Wall mountable wireless printer concept is attractive and impractical

A concept printer shown at the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, and designed by Ransmeier & Floyd takes a rather different approach to the concept of a printer. Rather than the usual practice of placing your printer as far out of sight as possible, you'd probably want to place this concept model in clear sight. Presumably battery powered (who would want a cable hanging off the wall?) the printer would communicate wirelessly with the printing device, and then feed the printout into a clear region at the bottom -- perfect if you print out attractive A4 landscapes all day long, not so if the last time you used a printer was for your tax return. As this is just a design concept, we don't have to tell you when this is going to be released (i.e. it won't), other than to say that it's a great idea that will hopefully influence the design of the industry's ugliest peripheral. We'd much prefer if they'd sort out those ridiculous ink prices first, though.

[derek @ May 27th 2007 12:30AM]

i think its interesting how they flipped the paper...

[Rob @ May 27th 2007 12:58AM]

Who say's they flipped the paper. Looks right to me.

[myscrnnm @ May 27th 2007 3:12AM]

"Who say's they flipped the paper. Looks right to me."

Maybe he meant to say that they flipped the two pictures. Because in the picture on the left, the picture is being held in a hand, whereas the already printed picture was in the photo on the right. But it should be the other way around, chronologically.

[derek @ May 27th 2007 12:48PM]

i mean it looks as if the paper is put in the portrait orientation, then comes out in the landscape orientation

[Sa_n) @ May 27th 2007 1:36AM]

I already see two problems with this design. As it is so compact, the size of the ink cartridges would be smaller and as it look, it is battery powered, so doing any heavy printing is out of the question.

But as a second (backup) printer to oo-and-ah friends may be worth the drawbacks. And it could serve as a large-format printer (11x17). Now I want one.

[Craig @ May 27th 2007 1:52AM]

Back To The Future II

[zoara @ May 27th 2007 10:18PM]

YOU'RE
FIRED!!!!

[andrew harrison @ May 27th 2007 3:01AM]

in the picture on the right it looks like it is standing upright on a support, like a picture frame. Using a power cord in that situation would not be a big deal at all.

If it was mounted on a wall, you could have the power cord installed [though that is a lot of effort to go through for a printer]

Still, the concept is good. It'd be nice to see some printers that bucked the trend a bit.

[mark allen @ May 27th 2007 5:20AM]

Taking away the wall mountable aspect it's still a pretty tidy design for using on a desk.

If it was a little thicker the paper could be stored behind the display area and lifted up before being put through the printer.

As for removing the paper if you look just above the slot there's an eject button.

[treetrunk @ May 27th 2007 5:46AM]

Would you be able to print more than one page at a time with this thing? Apart from the obvious limited capacity of the slot, "normal" printers rely on gravity to stack the output pages on top of each other, out of the way of the currently emerging page. Arranged like this it seems you'd need some probably not-too-reliable mechanism to stack pages together and keep them out of the way so that the next page doesn't "bump in to them" making a messy jam.

[Roy @ May 27th 2007 9:50AM]

"...normal printers rely on gravity to stack the output pages on top of each other, out of the way of the currently emerging page."

So does that one. You'll note the paper feed at the top. It looks like it just drops down into the bin at the bottom.

[Richard Lai @ May 27th 2007 11:12AM]

Yes, the paper drops down alright, but then stacking vertically is a different business.

[Mike @ May 27th 2007 12:29PM]

Well said Mr. Quilty-Harper!

[johnny5 @ May 27th 2007 12:30PM]

This is stuck uncomfortably between printer and picture frame, what with the paper sticking out the top and rather tall form. I took a somewhat different approach. It's an analog photo frame!
http://coloured.net/john/portfolio/photoradio/

[zoara @ May 27th 2007 10:20PM]

See your optometrist.

[Tony Colonello @ May 27th 2007 1:32PM]

"Presumably battery powered (who would want a cable hanging off the wall?)"

How many of the HDTVs hanging on walls are battery powered?

I do seem to remember a some years back a printer targeted toward laptops that was just a bit wider than a sheet of paper was only thick enough for the print head and the ink and it was battery powered. There was no facility to feed more than one page at a time through it and nothing to catch it printed page. But it was touted as being small enough to slip into your laptop bag. A quick search of Google seems to indicate that it has gone the way of the Woolly Mammoth.