Editing The Pen Addict 216/transcript (section)

== Cronzy Pen ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, Anna, how cronzy did you get last night? Did you get really cronzy on us? I got cronzy last night.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I got cronzy. We all got a bit cronzy. Got a little cronzy. So, the entire internet yesterday got in contact with me and Brad to let us know about an Indiegogo project called cronzy. And I first saw this on the Verge's Circuit Breaker Gadget blog. And it links off to an Indiegogo page funding a product called the cronzy. They are looking for $200,000 to help create the pen, which gives 16 million colors in your pocket. They have a flexible funding goal, which means whatever money pledged, they will keep. And currently, they are just a hair under $11,000 raised. Let me tell you what the cronzy does. And dear listener, if you've been listening to this show for a while, you can kind of try and maybe think that this sounds a little bit similar to you. So, the cronzy is a pen. It's an incredible pen that has a scanner built into one end of it. And you are able to scan any color that you come across in the real world. And the magical ink inside of the cronzy will automatically mix on the fly and change the ink that comes out of the tip of the pen to the color that you have scanned. Now, dear listeners, if you have been listening to this show for some time, you will know that this sounds almost exactly like our old friend, the scribble pen. For anyone who has not been listening to it, I'll find a couple of episodes that talk about the scribble pen on this show, and I'll put them in the show notes. But the scribble pen was a Kickstarter project that did just this. And after some complaints and some investigation, Kickstarter asked the scribble folk to provide a video that actually showed a working prototype, which they could not do to the satisfaction of Kickstarter. It was then kicked off. I think they maybe launched on Indiegogo. Indiegogo shut them down, and then they did some funding on their own, and it mainly went away. But now we have another product that is here that I guess is different.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So that's the big question, right? So it's identical in idea and functionality and theory. And they've gone a little... This is like...

'''Brad Dowdy:''' If the scribble pen took a year off to refine their scam further and make it even better, this is what they would come up with, right? So this is way nicer all the way around than the scribble pen in everything that they've done up until this point. Would you agree with that statement?

'''Ana Reinert:''' I'm putting air quotes around better.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes, relatively better. They've refined. And I'm not saying that this is the scribble people. And I am saying that the scribble pen was a scam. I'm not saying the Kronzee is a scam yet. But this is just creepy. This is like... It makes me ill. It's... Especially when I see something on The Verge. I tweeted The Verge writer one of the links of the scribble recap, you know, on why it was so bad. And she didn't respond to me, but that's okay.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So my feeling about this is it's a shame that it's there, but how are they to know? We were all taken in by the scribble. Right. To an extent. To an extent. I mean, we had lots of questions about the feasibility of it, but I don't think that we immediately called it a scam. We just had lots of questions. Sure.

'''Ana Reinert:''' Yeah, that's fair.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's fair.

'''Ana Reinert:''' And the video that was on The Verge addressed a lot of the questions that have been asked. Like, what happens when you switch colors? And they showed, yes, there is a transition period where, you know, when you switch from a reddish color to a bluish color, you're going to get some sort of purple happening, you know. So it's, I mean, it's all the things that we assumed were going to happen. Like, it doesn't immediately, you know, clean out the barrel. I mean, it's the same thing that happens if you just try to switch out ink cartridges in your pen. Like, you're going to have a transition where the feed is going to have a different color in it, and you're going to have the colors mixing, you know. So it's like, and it's the kind of stuff that it's like, if these are the same people, like, all they had to do was say, yeah, at a certain point, you're going to have to have a piece of scratch paper, you know, where you're going to have to do a little bit of scribbling, hence scribble pen, you know, while the color transitions. Like, it's not, like, it's not rocket science. Like, when you switch colors, you know, it's not unlike cleaning a paintbrush or cleaning out, you know, cleaning out your nib on a fountain pen. Like, when you change colors, you have to clean it out.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, so one of the comments in the Reddit thread that's following this, we'll put a link in the show notes for it because I can't say it because Michael will have to edit out the name of the Reddit group that it's in. But they pointed out in the video that they tested all the colors that didn't require color switching. So I thought that was, like, an immediate red flag. I mean, there's just so much, you know, these people, like,

'''Myke Hurley:''' What do you mean, Brad?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So it's a CMYK color cartridge right in the barrel. And they didn't switch to one of the colors. I'm not looking at it right now. But one of the colors was not a stock solid color.

'''Ana Reinert:''' It was like a purple or something.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. That would actually have to do the mix of, like, the pink and the blue, right, to make the purple. It did not do that. It did non-mixing color tests, if that makes sense.