The best Polaroid and instant printers for your smartphone
The best Polaroid and instant printers for your handset
Fujifilm Instax Share Smartphone Printer SP-1
Fujifilm’s Instax Share Smartphone Printer SP-1 is one of the better-known instant printers that let you bypass a PC and print Polaroid-style images directly from your smartphone. You simply connect to it using Wi-Fi as if it were a wireless router.
The Instax Share is available from Amazon UK for £108.99, or you can buy it in a bundle with 10(£124.99) or 20 shots (£144.95). When the photo paper runs out, current Amazon UK pricing is 10 ‘Mini sheets for £12.89 and 10 ‘Wide’ sheets for £9.95,
or twin bundles for £14.49 and £13.99 respectively. You can choose from a variety of templates, from standard White to Candy Pop, Comic, Dalmatian, Rainbow, Shiny Star, Stained Glass and Wedding.
As with the original Polaroid cameras on which the idea is based, this means each photo is reasonably expensive – your cheapest option (the 20x Wide) works out at 70p per photo. At least with these type of instant printers you get to choose only your favourite pictures, rather than snapping away and hoping the results are decent.
As well discover in the following slides, there are cheaper instant printers. However, what we particularly like about the Instax Share is the various templates that let you add captions with a message or the time and date, weather or even an Instagram or Facebook status.
Printing from your smartphone with the Instax Share printer is easy – download the free app from Google Play or the Apple App Store, choose an image from your photo gallery or social media, add a template and edit as required, then hit print.
The Instax Share is easily portable at 101.6x42x122.5mm and 253g. It requires two CR2 batteries that should be good for around 100 shots, or you can run it from a mains adaptor (although one is not supplied). LEDs at the front let you see at a glance when you’re running low on power or paper.
Polaroid Zip Instant Photoprinter
What better company to revolutionise the Polaroid camera concept than Polaroid itself? Polaroid’s Zip Instant Photoprinter is a similar setup to the Instax Share from Polaroid, connecting to your phone via Bluetooth (NFC is available for faster pairing) to print your favourite photos on-demand.
The Zip printer itself is a similar price to the Instax Share, at £109.99 from Amazon UK (in black, blue or red), but photo paper is cheaper. You can get a pack of 50 2x3in sheets from Amazon UK for £24.99, which means each shot works out at 50p – 20p cheaper than with the Instax.
This photo paper is known as Zink, which is short for zero ink. Polaroid says its
photo paper produces photo-quality, full-colour output that won’t smudge. Plus, it has a sticky back, so you won’t need Sellotape to pin your favourite selfies to your mirror.
Where the Polaroid Zip falls down against the Instax Share is in its lack of customisation options. Whereas you can edit images, add templates and choose from a variety of custom photo papers, with the Zip what you see is what you print. But that may be all you need.
The Zip is smaller and more portable than the Instax Share at 23x74x120mm and 186g, although both are pretty mini as printers go. It’s rechargeable battery should be good for around 25 shots.
Prynt Case
The Prynt Case is a slightly different approach to the instant smartphone printer, and acts as a case into which you slot your smartphone to produce a photo in under 30 seconds. This does mean, however, that it’s not available for all phones - Prynt currently lists white and black models for the iPhone 5/5c/5s/6/6s and Samsung Galaxy S4/S5 on its site.
The Prynt Case is currently available to preorder and should ship in mid-January 2016. It costs $139 and you get 10 sheets of photo paper; additional packs of 50 sheets cost $25, which means prints work out at half a dollar (around 33p) each. Standard shipping is an additional $12, but prices don’t include VAT, so you’ll need to add 20 percent if you’re shipping to the UK. This means the printer will set you back $178.80, or around £118.50.
Like the Instax Share it has a companion app that lets you add frames, filters, stickers and text, and
every time you take a photo the app records a short video and uploads it to the cloud. After the photo has been printed your friends can use the Prynt app to see the story behind the photo. And like the Polaroid Zip it uses Zink technology to produce highquality, smudge-resistant photo prints.
If you have a compatible phone the Prynt Case is the most easily portable solution here, and it has an internal battery that handily charges over Micro-USB.
Canon Selphy CP910
The Canon Selphy CP910 is a proper compact photo printer rather than something designed simply for printing from your phone, and as such it can print photos directly from an SD card, USB memory stick or camera via PictBridge, a PC or laptop via USB, and it can wirelessly connect to your phone over the Canon Easy-PhotoPrint app (also supports
AirPrint for Apple phones). It’s cheaper than the dedicated smartphone printers, with larger prints (available in around 27 seconds) that should last 100 years and lower running costs, but it’s also bulkier at 178x127x60.5mm and 810g – you’re unlikely to sling this one in a handbag. A battery pack, which lasts around 36 prints, is optional, but an AC power supply is included.
The Canon Selphy is currently £76 at Amazon UK. An ink and paper set with 108 sheets of 6x4in photo paper costs £23.56 (also from Amazon), which means photos work out at 22p each. You can also buy photo paper for credit-card- and Passport-photo-sized prints. Unlike the other compact photo printers here a 2.7in colour TFT screen is built-in, making it easier to browse to and select your images to print. The Canon uses a dyesublimation thermal transfer printing system, and produces prints at 300dpi. Marie Brewis