Photo printers can be generally found in two varieties and using two technologies. You have your standalone and multifunction printers which make use of the inkjet technology (the vast majority) or dye-sublimation. Aside from that a new technology has hit the market in the last past years and is still being perfected before more than a handful of printers using it will hit the shelves.




This technology is called zink. Zink printers are inkless photo printers and zink is short for zero ink. This technology completely eliminates the need for ink cartridges or ribbons. The technology was developed over several years and works with the help of some very ‘smart’ photo paper. The patented zink paper is made out of a material that includes cyan, magenta and yellow dye crystals as well as a po

lymer overcoat. Before printing the sheet of paper looks like any other. After heat from a compatible printer is targeted towards the paper, the crystals in the paper are activated and form the colors needed to transform the paper into a photograph. On top of that the result is also said to be smudge proof and water resistant.

Polaroid’s Pogo is probably the first photo printer to make use of the Zink technology. The Polaroid camera implied instant printing and PoGo works in the same way. Compared to older cameras that could only snap the picture and print it out, the Pogo comes with a wide variety of photo adjusting features like view, crop or borders.

The only thing a user can complain about is the relatively small size of the photographs, at 2 by 3 inches. The Pogo is basically a 5.0 megapixel digital camera as well as a printer. It has a 3 inch color LCD that works well for previewing pictures and more. For storing picture the user gets 16MB of internal memory on top of a SD card slot that allows an even higher storage capacity.

When you receive the printer you’ll discover that the rechargeable battery is already in the box so there will be no need to purchase it separately. Also included are 10 sheets of paper to get you started and see how the printer works. On top of the advantage list we can also mention the fact that the Polaroid Pogo is probably the smallest and most portable printer to be found on the market. You can actually stick the printer in a pocket and carry it around as it only measures 3 x 4.7 x 2 inches and weighs 10 ounces without battery. For extra convenience the printer also ships with a wrist strap.

Before you jump to buy these inkless photo printers though, please do consider the bad points as well. One of them would be that zink technology is still fresh on the market hence it hasn’t been fully perfected. The quality of the prints isn’t out of this world and the cost of the paper you constantly need to buy may make you prefer an inkjet.

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