It's an expensive unit, with the inconvenience of having to drag an external power supply around to make any quantity of prints. The pricey prints themselves are postage-stamp sized and not very good quality. You can't even connect this thing to your PC - and yet it still scores 65%

Just out of interest, what score would it have got if they'd just sent you the empty box - 60%?

I would have expected a review to sport at least one or two pictures of "real world" results instead of just promotion shots.

Zinc has several problems.

a) it is wasteful

b) it is expensive

c) it is easily substituted by sharing around digital data via bluetooth or e-mail

d) the quality sucks

...

I find the small size especially unappealing. A Polaroid, as mediocre as the overall quality may be, comes with an aesthetic white frame as standard which also provides room for information, while the Zinc paper looks as though it came from inside a bubble gum wrapper.

... actually use Polaroid cameras for *anything other than* 'Readers Wives' submissions for Razzle?

Just curious.

a) Wasteful? How do you work that out?

With an inkjet printer, even if you refill the cartridges, you have the cartridge ending up in landfill or using energy to be disassembled and recycled at the end of its life. With dye sub film printers (like Canon's SELPHY range), you have the film and dye, much of which is left on its carrier film and binned. The ZINK technology is completely self-contained in the paper. There's no wastage at all.

c) You're not comparing like with like. You can, of course, share images around electronically, but we're looking at a device for somebody who wants images on paper. You could level the comment at all printers, but its unfair to single out this particular one.

b) and d) Agreed.

...it's an expensive, practically useless piece of junk which doesn't even produce acceptable print quality. And it's SLOW -- one stamp per minute as opposed to three standard-sized pictures from a compact thermo printer that costs the same and is every bit as portable.

FAIL.

a) It is wasteful in that it produces an item that is not really worth producing, employing crystal-coated, likely difficult if at all to recycle "paper" that will likely be discarded within days if not within the hour. So it is inherently wasteful. Yes, those compact ink- or dye-sublimation based printers employ more material but the item produced is more likely worth keeping. Which is worse?

b) I tried to incorporate the given quality into this thought, the problematic bit being that digitally shared pics should look better than Zinc on many phones these days. Or rather: Why would you want that level of quality on paper? It cannot be meant to only cater to teenagers, can it?

In the end, all that goes for Zinc is the size of the printer. I have already seen cameras that come with an integrated one. Nevertheless, one would have wished a "next gen" product would improve on its predecessor in terms of quality.

Do let us all know the name of the 'compact thermo printer' that is every bit as portable as the PoGo and can produce three standard sized prints in a minute.

Aside from the genius use of not having to send racy snaps off to the photo developer, the Polaroid was largely used in (amazingly enough) the professional studio photography realm back in the film days. Many professional cameras (such as the Mamiya RZ67) had interchangeable backs--one of which would hold medium format film (6x6, 6x7, etc) and another would be a Polaroid back. The polaroids would be used to check exposure, framing, etc, before the final shot was taken on "real" film. This was usually kind of a crapshoot however because of the poor performance of Polaroid film, but it was better than nothing. There are still some applications, for instance google for Joe McNally's "Faces of Ground Zero" project.

I don't have any polaroid backs any longer because I test with a digital SLR before committing to film, but I do still have a couple consumer Polaroid cameras; there's a primitive aesthetic to the system that's occasionally appealing. The film is unfortunately becoming very difficult to come by (being discontinued).

As for the reviewed printer itself--it seems a rather spectacular waste of money. There's no professional use for it, and if I wanted crap quality prints with the mates I'd run down to a photobooth.

print of just over 23p, which isn’t cheap....22p a print from a Canon Selphy ES3,.... 15p from an Epson PictureMate PM290 or 11p from an HP Photosmart A636. All of these are producing 6 x 4 prints for these prices.

Or your local photo place for about 5 - 10p each and better!

When they work out about 2p each, then call me....

For events where a standardized and adequate picture needs to be attached at time of submission to an applicant's paperwork, this would be useful.

The biggest users of Polaroid cameras and films are, of all things, television studios. I know of several TV game shows, for instance, which, as part of their application process, snap a Polaroid pic to be attached to the applicant's test results and questionnaire at the time of the interview. From examples with which I'm familiar, these productions probably go through about six to eight packs (10 shots per pack, IIRC) per day during a typical 120-day production season.

Being able to do the same thing with digital cameras and a few of these (since there are usually several intake people working at once) the same result could be achieved.

...Just sayin' that there might be a use for something like this.

As a side note -- my daughter, a fine-art photographer, was bummed when Polariod got out of the instant-film business. She had converted a Polaroid to a pinhole camera and was getting some amazing effects with it -- the long exposures required for a pinhole camera makes very dense images with a wide tonal range that you would never expect from an instant-film camera, and each picture is truly one of a kind.

imagine the hours of entertainment to be had squirting your candid snaps to complete strangers, knowing that you're not just embarrassing them, but costing them money at the same time

"The second way of connecting the Pogo printer – and, we suspect, the one more likely to be used – is over Bluetooth from a mobile phone"

Whoopie, now instead of taking a picture of my ass with a friends camera phone, setting as their wall paper I can bluejack their printer and print snaps of it as well.

/Mines the one with the antenna sticking out of the pocket