By Andrew Liszewski
Imagine a Canon or Epson bubble jet printer small enough to fit in your hand and you’ve got the basic idea of the Xyron Design Runner. However instead of feeding paper through the printer to get an image you instead move the Design Runner back and forth over the page to ‘print-out’ your design.
Using an optical sensor on the bottom (like a mouse) the Design Runner senses the speed and motion of the unit and will ensure that the speed of printing is synchronized to avoid smeared results. Over at Rainy Day Magazine, Wan Chi Lau has posted a First Look & Use of the Design Runner and once they got the hang of using it the printed results are surprisingly good.
As part of the starter kit the Design Runner comes with a disc that includes 40 unique designs. While you can buy other discs with different patterns you unfortunately can’t create your own custom designs. In fact while the memory cards used by the Design Runner are the exact same size and shape as an SD card, they are slightly different and can not be read with an SD card reader. However that being said I’m sure there are plenty of people out there already trying to find a work-around to this.
The Xyron Design Runner starter set is currently available for $159.99. Replacement ink cartridges in either black, red or green are also available for $39.99 each.
