If you like your photo devices small, sleek, and filled with cutting-edge technology, the new pint-sized Polaroid PoGo mobile printer has likely already caught your attention as it has mine. Throw in the magical quality anyone over the age of 25 still associates with the name Polaroid -- I can still remember the first time I ever saw a Polaroid develop instantly before my eyes -- and you have what should be a real turnaround product for the now fading Polaroid brand, right?
That, at least, was my initial thinking after seeing a recent demo of the Polaroid PoGo ($150), a new inkless photo printer that's small enough to fit in a coat pocket and features wireless connectivity for beaming photos from your cell phone to the Pogo. Though I was hard pressed to think of any immediate "business" applications for the 8-ounce Polaroid PoGo, it sounded like a great mobile device that Biz Fast Trackers -- along with the younger "Born Digital" crowd -- would go crazy for. And, after playing around with the Polaroid PoGo for a week or so, I've found a lot to like including its svelte, stylish design; fun "peel and stick" photo paper which reminded me of the old Polaroid i-Zone cameras; and innovative technology which puts the ink in the paper not in the printer.
But, unfortunately, I've also found a lot to dislike about the Polaroid PoGo including its dodgy wireless connectivity which doesn't make it compatible with some cell phones on the market; its very short battery life; and its generally poor image quality, even when printing from high-resolution digital cameras. There's no doubt there are some major trade-offs with the Polaroid PoGo but there's something undeniably cool about it too making this a very mixed bag of a product. You'll either love the PoGo or hate it. Even now, I'm still not sure which side of the fence I'm on.
Magic Crystals
One of the key innovations about the Polaroid PoGo is its paper. The reason the PoGo is so small -- just a tad bigger than an iPhone -- is that it doesn't use ink cartridges or ribbons in the printer. Instead, the ink is embedded in the paper as dye crystals using the revolutionary ZINK Zero Ink Printing Technology. In the ZINK system, colorless cyan, yellow and magenta dye crystals are sandwiched between a protective polymer overcoat and a paper base. Heat from the Polaroid PoGo printer cooks the color in the dye crystals, turning the white paper into a colorful print.
The slim profile of the printer limits the size of the paper to just 2 x 3-inch prints which is about equivalent to a business card. The ZINK paper doesn't feel like traditional photo paper either, more like a swatch of soft vinyl which doesn't require any air drying when a print spits out of the PoGo. You can just pick up you tiny photo and touch its surface right away without any danger of smearing as on inkjet prints. The paper is also waterproof and tear proof.
You can peel off the plastic backing on your print to reveal a sticky side which lets your mount your photos on most any surface. Refrigerators and notebooks are some good spots but I'm sure kids will be sticking PoGo prints on locker doors and desks just as they did with images from the old Polaroid i-Zone cameras. Printing, which is done very quietly, take about a minute per photo though varies from print to print.
Wi-Fi Woes
In the demo I saw of the PoGo, printing images wirelessly from your cell phone to the Polaroid printer seemed so easy. Just turn on the Bluetooth connectivity on your cell or smart phone; choose the PoGo printer from the list of available devices; enter a password; and press send and your images will start printing out. When I got my Pogo test unit home though, the Bluetooth on my Motorola RAZR V3m cell phone -- which I may add is still one of the most popular mobile phones out there -- could not find the printer. It was only later when I consulted a PoGo compatibility site that I realized the RAZR V3m was not compatible.
Since my wife has the same phone as me, I tried to make the Bluetooth connection with a Palm Centro I had lying around from a previous smart phone story for DemystifyingDigital.com. This time, even though the PoGo compatibility site said the Centro should work with the printer, it still refused to make the wireless connection. While it was a frustrating experience for me, I'm sure some consumers will find it especially infuriating when they discover that their beloved iPhone -- the very cutting edge of the cutting edge in smart phones -- is not compatible with the PoGo either. Oh well.
PictBridge Pleasures
On the other hand, printing directly to the PoGo from a digital camera via a USB cord using PictBridge (a very common camera standard) was a pleasure by comparison. I just connected my Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS digital camera to the PoGo by the Canon-supplied USB cable; choose the image I wanted via playback on my camera; and the hit the blue glowing button on back of the SD1100, and the image started printing out.
Though I found the process of printing via USB cable to be relatively seamless, the fact that I needed to use wires at all kind of defeated the purpose of this "wireless" printer. While users with compatible cell phones will not have the same annoyances, there are many with older phones who will. Polaroid should definitely work to remedy these glitches.
They should also try and address the PoGo's woeful battery life. It takes about 2.5 hours to fully charge the battery in the PoGo but because the heating element in the printer burns up so much juice, you can only get approximately 15 prints from the device before it peters out. Of course you can always print by connecting the PoGo to an outlet using the power cord, but that also takes away from the printer's mobility.
To top it off, the special Zink paper that's sold with the PoGo isn't cheap. A 10-sheet pack costs $3.99, while a 30-sheet pack sells for $9.99. (The PoGo comes with one 10-sheet pack.)
Questionable Color
I also wasn't thrilled with the color produced by the PoGo. In particular, I found the skin tones to be, at best, inaccurate and, at worst, downright scary. For example, in several images taken of me and my wife on our recent honeymoon in St. Martin, instead of spotlighting my healthy-looking tan, photos printed with the PoGo from the 8-megapixel SD1100 IS made my skin look like it was stricken with a bad rash, almost as I had come down with a case of chicken pox. Conversely, travel shots I took of the Caribbean which should have been full of vibrant color, seemed to lack saturation in photos printed on the PoGo, resembling old snapshots that had faded over time.
Perhaps I'm being too hard on the image quality from the printer. This is, obviously, not supposed to be for making professional quality prints. And when I decided to use the PoGo just to print out silly shots -- such as my wife forcibly "mecking" one of our cats, or just goofy candids from parties -- I didn't mind the strange color of the prints. And these sorts of photos are what younger consumers will likely use the PoGo for. Still I didn't find the image quality from the PoGo to be on par with classic Polaroid photos or even with images captured with an i-Zone camera.
Final Thoughts
As I said at the beginning of this review, there's a lot to like about the Polaroid PoGo and a lot not to like. How you react to the PoGo's pluses and minuses may depend on how you use it. If you accept it as just a cool gadget that might turn a few heads and get a few laughs at parties, you might enjoy this printer -- especially if you try it with a compatible cell phone. If, however, you struggle to make the wireless connection with an incompatible phone, or get bugged out by funky looking color in your prints, you might be immune to the PoGo's whimsical charms. Whether the PoGo is the beginning of a rebirth for the Polaroid brand, or just be a last gasp remains to be seen. For all us old Polaroid fans out there, I hope it's not the later.