Polaroid’s Newest Camera Instantly Prints Smudge-Proof, Tear-Resistant Photos
Don't shake it like a Polaroid picture.
The internet is chock full of ways to organize your digital snapshots and even turn them into physical keepsakes, but there’s still only one surefire way to ensure your precious kid pics are never lost in the cloud: don’t put them there in the first place. Polaroid, which mastered instant, hard-copy, no-cloud photography decades ago, then got buried by the digital revolution, and then resurrected itself with a kid-friendly action cam, is about to make once-ubiquitous “Polaroids” a thing again.
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The Polaroid Snap is a combination of old and new: a 10-megapixel standalone camera (no, really, that’s all it does) that saves a digital copy to an SD card and also prints your photo instantly … on actual paper. The resulting 2″ by 3″ pictures are rendered in less than a minute on inkless “ZINK Paper” through a fancy process of layering and heating colored dye crystals, the effectiveness of which you’ll surely undermine by flopping your photos around to make them develop quicker. It doesn’t work, you guys! Stop and appreciate the science!
The ZINK Paper photos are smudge-proof, water resistant, and tough to tear — in other words, kid-safe. And they’re adhesive-backed, so when Grandma runs out of magnets for all the prints you’ll be sending her,* she can just start sticking them directly on the fridge. The only downside is that the Snap, which will sell for $99, doesn’t go on sale until sometime this fall.
*Purely hypothetical. Grandma never runs out of magnets.
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