Have you been waiting for the digital equivalent of the traditional Polaroid instant-camera experience? As the Polaroid PoGo Instant Digital Camera is a hybrid printer/camera product, we enlisted PCMag’s printer and camera experts, M. David Stone and PJ Jacobowitz, to review it. One thing I can tell you: They both had a lot of fun testing it.
This 5-megapixel camera uses the same ZINK (zero ink) technology to output its photos as the Polaroid PoGo Instant Photo Printer and the Dell Wasabi PZ310 . With ZINK, clear dye crystals are embedded in the photo paper; heat from the printhead activates the color in the crystals. A downside is that you’re limited to 2- by 3-inch photos; one thing you can do with the PoGo that you couldn’t with an analog Polaroid camera is to save and store digital versions of your photos. You will need an SD card, as the camera comes without one, and its internal memory is only enough to hold a handful of images.
The PoGo’s image quality is modest, about that of a high-quality camera phone. Prints are tiny, and ZINK isn’t yet up to the standards of ink-based photo printing. But it provides what people want and expect from a Polaroid camera–enjoyable picture-taking and the ability to print your results out on the spot (and perhaps to draw a small crowd while you’re doing so, as happened with one of our reviewers).
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