Back in the days of the 1970s, if you wanted a photo instantly, you used a Polaroid camera, which not only took a photo, but also developed it instantly as well, coming as it did with its own technology for developing the print on special paper. Some years later, digital camera technology came along and all but killed off the film-based camera market, with pics that could be seen instantly, either on the camera’s screen or on your PC.

So you’d think that Polaroid, whose sole unique selling point was the ability to show the pics you’ve taken instantly, would also be dead. But you’d be wrong. Turns out that we still like to see our pics on paper, and now that we’re used to the instantaneous speed of seeing our pics in digital form that the digital camera offers, we also want to see our pics on paper, well, instantly.

Step forward Polaroid and their brand new, and rather neat looking, Polaroid PoGo Inkless Digital Photo Printer.

The Polaroid PoGo is nothing short of a marvel of technology. Using either Bluetooth or PictBridge, you beam your pictures to the PoGo from either a digital camera or camera phone and it’ll print them out for you on a 2″ x 3″ sheet of paper in less than 60 seconds. More amazing still, it does this using an inkless printer – that’s right, absolutely no ink is used in the printing process, which is why the PoGo can be so small.

Instead, special Zero Ink paper is used from a company called ZINK (what else?!), which uses colourless cyan, yellow and magenta crystals embedded within the paper, which, when heated up (this is the bit that printer actually does), produce the appropriate colour in the appropriate spot.

As you can see from the rather cute the video below, the Polaroid PoGo is a work of genius. It has the wow factor and is genuinely useful too. Just imagine taking photos of your mates in the pub (why do all my camera phone examples involves mates in a pub?!) and then giving them the print out instantly.

I like this gadget a lot. I’ve no idea what Polaroid have been doing in the past decade or so since digital photography virtually destroyed their market, but the PoGo sees them bouncing back in style (PoGo – bouncing – geddit?! Oh, what’s the use?!)

[Source: SlashPhone]