Polaroid PoGo review

Remember Polaroid's instant cameras? They were simple and fun to use, though they certainly wouldn't fit in the average pocket. The film was expensive, and Polaroid finally stopped manufacturing it earlier this year, so an era has officially ended.

Fortunately, they've come up with a successor for the digital age. Polaroid's ZINK ('zero ink technology') may find its way into a camera in the near future, but for now we have this printer, which you can use with your own digital camera to resurrect the instant gratification of getting proper photos as soon as you take them. The sturdy little unit prints glossy 2x3 inch photos from your camera phone via Bluetooth or from a PictBridge compatible camera, and it has a rechargeable battery so you can output pictures wherever you go.

The PoGo needed no setup, and a photo from our Bluetooth phone was printed within a minute of hitting the Send key. To print from a digital camera, you need to dig out the camera's USB cable, connect it to the PoGo's USB port and put the camera into PictBridge mode. Oddly, the first PictBridge camera we tried, a Fuji Finepix A500, wouldn't recognise the printer. We had more luck with a Ricoh 500SE. You'd need to get Polaroid to confirm your model, or try it before buying.

We were pleased with our PoGo prints. Although small and no match for full size photo printers, pictures from both phone and camera showed impressively accurate colour and exposure.

The best thing about the PoGo is that it doesn't need ink. Instead, it uses a thermal technique to activate special glossy paper with a claimed 100 billion dye crystals embedded in each sheet. Ten sheets cost £3, which sounds steep, but given that there's nothing else to pay for, 30p a print isn't bad for occasional use. The prints are dry the moment they emerge, are water-resistant, and can evenbe used as stickers by peeling their backing off. They're also tiny, but that's part of the fun.

Easy to use, well built, pocketable, and not excessively pricey to buy or run, the PoGo will be on our Christmas list, if we can wait that long.

Author: Andy Zarkesh