Polaroid GL10 Instant 3X4 Mobile Bluetooth Printer for Digital Cameras and Smart Phones

The GL-10 is what I've been waiting for all these years.

After searching for an instant photo solution, and no matter what I tried, I was never quite happy. I own 5 working polaroid cameras (3 land cameras, an SLR-5 Macro onestep and a Graflex XL RF with a packfilm back), 2 pogo printers with the 1st gen ZINK system, and an HP A640 instant printer. None of them make me remotely as happy as this printer does. The packfilm cameras? Great film, giant cameras, spotty usage success with semi-automatic annoyances, lots of waste and the prints need to dry. Forget about ambient nightlight and expect to lose a couple shots per pack with loading issues. Pogo? Gah....party favor stickers were nice, but crap for battery life and Colors McRudderson was the result on your best day. The HP instant printer was HUGE, ink was a drag, and the quality is so-so after all that work anyway.

The GL-10 is what I've been waiting for all these years.

Leaps and bounds improvement in quality over the pogo. Still talking mid-range quality, but it's way better than the film the impossible project is putting out for it's one step cameras (or the unusable expired original film...."soft tone" my taint!) and considering the tradeoff size/toner/paper for any of the other battery powered options (HP, epson, canon selphy, etc), the pixels/per/hassles ratio is way better than anything else out there. The best business card you could ask for is this in the back pocket of your jeans with a felt tip pen and a USB cable. The only thing I could compare it to from a "WOW HOW DID YOU DO THAT----THAT'S AWESOME" factor is the land cameras, but considering their use record, I'll take a 70-75% quality 100% of the time compared to 100% quality 40% of the time any day of the week. As I said,

The GL-10 is what I've been waiting for all these years.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm actually considering buying the camera that's coming out soon just because I use the printer so much (40 pictures in one weekend of travel meeting new friends) that I'd just as soon not have the hassle of hooking the cord up to my pocket SD-1400. Anyway, I think you get my drift.

Note to Zink: make 3x4" paper that has a sticky back! That would be great. That is all.

First off, this is a great fun little printer. I use it to create small samples of my photographs to hand out to prospective clients as well as friends and family. The prints are 3"x4" and because of the inkless (Zink - for 'zero ink') printing menthod, the prints are instantly dry as there is no wet process going on. Crucially this means no additional costs for ink supplies. All you need is the paper.

Being a Bluetooth printer means it is very easy to get images onto the device to print although annoyingly there seems to be no buffer which means images have to be transferred one at a time. Prints take around 20-30 seconds to print. Each pack of 3"x4" contains 30 sheets of paper in 10-pack mini-cases. Prices for these vary and although available here on Amazon, at the time of writing, this was only through resellers, although the one I use is a 'Fulfilled by Amazon' scheme member - and the cost with them is £14.99.

There are some things to be aware of:

1. The first and possibly most important for users of the most popular phone right now, is that there is currently no way of Bluetooth printing direct from the iPhone. There is talk of a Polaroid app being produced to allow this, but there's no sight of it yet. iPhone users will need to transfer images to a computer and send them via Bluetooth from there.

2. Second - print quality. Contrary to some opinions, this printer is CAPABLE of producing great quality prints and reproducing reasonably accurate colours BUT it is sensitive to the quality of the file sent to it. At anything under about 150-200k, solid areas of colour will be inconsistent or patchy.

3. Image cropping - because the aspect ratio of the prints and their size, the printer will auto-detect the main area of the image and print accordingly. SOMETIMES, this means you won't get exactly what you thought you would. The only way past this is to edit images to the correct size before printing, although this kind of defeats the impulsive nature of it.

However, taking it for what it is, a great little fun printer, you won't be disappointed.

Fantastic product, and the best I've used in a while. It's hard to find one product that is adaptable for smart phones, and cameras, but this ticks all the boxes! good value for money, especially considering it does the job of two of a similar product. Great buy!