There are a number of ways to print photos you snap with your smartphone… but most of them require actually transferring a digital file from your phone to a computer of some sort.
The Polaroid Lab is… something else.
It’s basically a scanner and a printer: you place your phone face-down on top of the device, it snaps photos of your photo, and then it prints out a Polaroid-style photo using Polaroid film.
There’s a bit more to it than that. There’s a Polaroid Originals app on your phone that lets you adjust exposure, color correction, and other settings. And then that image is projected onto the film… which you can then shake while the image develops if that’s your jam.
The Polaroid Lab will be available October 10th for $130.
Or you could just take your phone to a drug store or camera shop or whatever…Â and print higher-quality pictures in a range of sizes at a lower price (Polaroid film ain’t cheap). Your call.
If this all seems like a rather ambitious project for Polaroid, which is a shell of the brand it once was, that’s because it’s basically not truly a Polaroid product.
A few years ago, the folks at The Impossible Project crowdfunded an early version of an Instant Lab photo printer, and the company has since licensed the Polaroid name to become Polaroid Lab.
I find this thing incredibly stupid… So it could be a success.
This seems like the kind of product that a retro oddware reviewer would dust off in 2030 to make a video of.
Cool, but you could also send the image to a cheap wifi printer in your home.
And get better results (at least with resolution–not necessarily color accuracy).
The ultimate “Hey we can do this” but someone really should have asked “Should we do this?”. Wonder who Polaroid thinks the market segment is for this…
Read the article–Polaroid is just licensing their name.
This would be really useful if you were making a TV series set in the 80s and you needed to have some Polaroid pictures of things. /sarc