Polaroid

[BigV]

It's baaaa-aaaack!

Instant Digital Prints (and Polaroid Nostalgia)

By ANNE EISENBERG
Published: April 13, 2008

MILLIONS of families once snapped Polaroid photographs and enjoyed passing around the newly minted prints on the spot, instead of waiting a week for them to be developed.

Now, Polaroid wants to conjure up those golden analog days of vast sales and instant gratification — this time with images captured by digital cameras and camera phones.

This fall, the company expects to market a hand-size printer that produces color snapshots in about 30 seconds.

Beam a photograph from a cellphone to the printer and, with a gentle purr, out comes the full-color print — completely formed and dry to the touch.

The printer, which connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to phones and by cable to cameras, will cost about $150. The images are 2 inches by 3 inches, the size of a credit card. The new printers are so lightweight that a Polaroid executive demonstrating them recently had three tucked unnoticeably into various pockets of his trim jacket, whipping them out as if he were Harpo Marx.

Now this is cool. I have a decent camera in my phone, and I do take my phone with me more places than I take my camera. I can see a market for this. All the kids with a penchant for "retro" can now get a, omg, *physical* print of the picture! How quaint!