Every time I saw one of these tiny Polaroid PoGo printers in the shops I was reminded of David Du Chemin's book, Within The Frame. One of the things that he finds useful to break the ice when he wants to photograph people is to make a small print from a portable printer. I have no idea what printer David uses, but this little polaroid camera is now at the right price point to make it worth giving a try. Most retailers are now selling the printer for just under £30 and you can currently pick one up from Misco for £19.99.
This teeny tiny little printer is not much bigger than a pack of cards and spits out a 2x3" colour print in under a minute. The prints are dry to touch, water-resistant, tear-proof, smudge-proof, peel-off sticky backed. I persuaded my one to print a picture of itself printing a picture of itself, printing a picture of itself.. you get the picture. The print quality is not brilliant, the blacks are not quite deep enough and if you look closely there is some banding evident and they are a little soft, but these aren't supposed to be perfect, just convenient. Compared to the original consumer polaroids they are pretty good prints.
The instructions are pretty minimalist, but once you figure out how to load the paper, with the blue intelligent sheet at the bottom its pretty straight forward. On my Sony I set the usb mode to PTP and then connecting the camera and printer automatically loaded the pictbridge screens on my camera.
You can pickup 70 sheets
of ZINK paper for just over a tenner which is actually not bad at all. There is no actual ink so its all pretty clean and self contained. I like it. I think my kids will like it too.
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