World smallest A4 printer that is.

The Planon Pintstik is a tiny thermal printer using the same technology that can be found in pre-2000 fax machines and many receipt printers. When I accidentally came across this online on ebay I did the right and honourable thing. £50 and 2 days later it’s sitting on my desk. It’s crying out to be hacked. Amazingly they still retail at over £400.

With a built in battery, paper cartridge and bluetooth, it’s actually a fantastic piece of engineering and design but let down by poor software, marketing and price. The internal paper cartridge holds a roll of 20 sheets and costs an eye watering £20 to replace (pack of 6). Bear in mind a 6 pack of 50m fax roll can be picked up for next to nothing.

I’d love to embed in this into unexpected objects or structures. Imagine a a 40m print out of live tweets emanating from a crack in a wall.

Undoubtedly, this will become the basis of another project in the near future. In the mean time, I have NASA data to hack.

Watch this space.

Check out the sped up video of it below. At 0.42 seconds the video reverts to real-time.

Planon Printstik – Worlds Smallest Printer from Navid Gornall on Vimeo.