Portable printers have made working on the road a lot more convenient, letting you pull document printouts anytime the need for one arises. And while the current crop of portable printers work well enough for mobile workers, this Mini Mobile Robotic Printer shrinks it down to an even more manageable size.
Made by Israel-based Zuta Labs, it’s an entirely fresh take on mobile printers. Instead of a page-wide device that you feed paper into, it’s like a mini-Roomba that passes over a sheet of paper laid out on a table. Rather than clean every surface it crosses like a robot vacuum would, however, it receives your digital documents over Bluetooth and prints a hardcopy directly on the paper.
The Mini Mobile Robotic Printer is, basically, a tiny robot armed with a printhead and a set of wheels, allowing it to travel the entire area of the paper going from left to right and top to bottom. Do note, you have to position it right on the upper left corner of the paper, just like you have to line up the paper properly when using a more conventional portable printer, but that’s all the hassle you will need to put up with. Printing speed is decent, too, with the device able to finish an entire letter-sized sheet in around 40 seconds. All standard paper sizes are supported.
Dimensions are 10 cm tall and 11.5 cm in diameter, with a weight of 300g, easily making it the most portable printer in the market. It comes with a replaceable ink cartridge that can produce up to 1,000 pages before requiring a replacement, so unless you’re printing a 100-page manual for a meeting of 20 people in an afternoon, it should last you for a while. Rechargeable battery is only good for up to one hour of runtime, though.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Mini Mobile Robotic Printer. Pledges to reserve a unit starts at $180.