By Evan Ackerman
The Scan Toaster isn’t the first toast printer we’ve come across, but it is (as far as I know) the first internet-enabled toasting printing appliance. It sounds like a bit of a gimmick, but think about it… If you’re the sort of person who likes to devour the news in the morning, you can set up the Scan Toaster to toast you an RSS feed of news headlines. Or if you need to see whether it’s going to be toasty outside, you can have it print out the weather forecast. Or if you’re worried you’re going to be in a crunch getting to work, it can toast the current time and traffic advisories. And it’s not limited to text… The printing elements are small enough to toast pixels at a fairly high resolution and with varying brightness (i.e. burnt-ness), allowing for recognizable brownscale images. Just be careful not to try to toast too many pieces at once, ’cause you might get a bread jam.
Designer Sung Bae Chang conceived of the Scan Toaster for a contest sponsored by Electrolux, and it’s sadly not yet past the concept stage. Maybe if we butter up Electrolux a little bit they’d be willing to put it into production.
[ Electrolux ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]
