quick link | polaroid pogo homepage
Sounds pretty impressive right? - while i was away recently i had an interesting email about a product that i had seen @documentally talk about on his blog. I never took that much interest before because i have no real requirement for a portable printer (although recently a colour laser at home would be useful) - this said i decided to test the portable printer regardless and give it a run through it's paces with an unboxing video and a hands on test.
to quote the website.. .
Polaroid has reinvented instant photography for the digital age with the Polaroid PoGo™ Instant Mobile Printer. Sleek, stylish, and easy to use, the Polaroid PoGo™ Instant Mobile Printer lets you share photos whether you are on vacation or just hanging out with your friends. Bring Polaroid magic from your camera phone or digital camera with ZINK™ Zero Ink™ Printing Technology from ZINK Imaging. Mobile and easy-to-use, the Polaroid PoGo™ Instant Mobile Printer provides a new, innovative way to share digital photos directly from your camera phone or digital camera, instantly. The Polaroid Way.
unboxing the polaroid pogo unit
slightly confusing which way up the bottom blue part should be on, which way is the bottom and which is top of the unit, nothing shows which way around the printhead is - putting the paper/print paper in with the blue card at the bottom pulled through the paper card straight away as soon as we closed the unit.
setting the unit up to print from bluetooth and usb
getting quite excited now as the unit is all charged up and ready to go, yet searching on my uk o2 apple iphone shows nothing when we do a search for the unit via bluetooth. a quick search of the website shows an epic fail - this unit will NOT work with an apple iphone at all. period. i guess this is not the fault of polaroid because of the way that the unit expects the data to be delivered but it does remind me of a time when you could not buy printers and get drivers for mac hardware vs pc equipment.
after the minor fail of the ability for the unit to work with an iphone we tried it with a sony ecrisson k850i (sams) and it worked first time, we have to use a bluetooth code 6000 and prints started to run straight off - and this is when the problems started on the actual quality of the printing.
quality, speed, output and running costs
certain areas of the printout were fantastic yet others areas had really bad banding, almost like ink jet printers that need their heads cleaning a few times.
turns out that the blue card that comes with the packs of paper seems to calibrate the printer and you have to make sure that the barcode looking side is at the bottom of the printer facing up. It will pull the blue paper through, do what it needs to do to calibrate and if you have sent a print to the unit it will start to print, it roughtly takes around a minute or so. the bits of paper have a sticky backing to them and i think this is really who the printer is designed for - people who want to make sticker books, i guess also it could be pretty neat for events or small gathers in some way too.
the unit was available on froogle at the time of writing this blog entry (google product search) for about £70, packs of 10 sheets of pogo printer paper cost roughly £3. The printer requires no ink as the unit works on an advanced method of thermal transfer and the colours of the output are good. it is not a professional kind of printer so do not expect the quality of a dedicated photo printer because it simply is not that.
It's a bit of fun, the pricing of the unit is pretty good, i think if they shaved off a bit more money and made it £60 with the packs of paper around the 15 pence per picture mark then i think they could probably sell quite a few of these units.
I do have eco concerns about this unit from a number of angles however and i would like polaroid to address those and give kids more information about the savings from not having ink requirments and making a bit of background about the stickers - are they eco friendly? - if not, they should be, at this price bracket it does not mean they should be any less responsible about giving out environmental advice on best practice.
All in all, i was very surprised at this new device from polaroid, especially as i remember in the early 70's using a unit that spit out a picture that magically developed infront of your eyes, even today some software programs try to imitate the way the photo looked and the dimensions and style of the output. It is the sign of a true classic product if your remember the device based on the physical output. I do not feel the same of this new pogo but i do like the direction that polaroid is going and look with interest at future products again from them really soon.
