Polaroid PoGo ‘mobile’ printer

Last year, I received a Polaroid PoGo printer for Christmas and with it came daydreams of creating a photo-a-day journal in a series of Moleskine Cahier notebooks….

I never made it out of January.

My beloved new gadget wasn’t what I hoped it would be… instead of being a source of inspiration, it became a major frustration.  So, soon it sat on a shelf gathering dust.

The PoGo is designed to be a mobile printer: a small, battery powered, pocket-size device that could print small 2×3 low fidelity pictures on the go.  A pseudo-replacement for the middle ground between film & digital photography lost after Polaroid bewilderingly discontinued its namesake instant films.

You would no longer need a bulky Polaroid camera with expensive film to have that instant gratification of physically holding a photograph you just captured… any digital camera would do, even your always-on-you cell phone (as long as your device had bluetooth or was PictBridge enabled and had a USB cable with you).

Sounded good enough to me.

Yet the problem with the PoGo lies in the battery: It sucks.

The damn thing won’t hold a charge.

How can it be a mobile printer, if I was constantly tethered to a transformer and power cord whenever i wanted to use it?

I contacted Polaroid customer service about it and received a canned response that failed to address my specific issue, but rather stated that I should get 15-20 prints per charge. Yeah, I wasn’t even getting a single print off of battery power. So assuming I had a defective printer, I exchanged it @ Target for another one (but in doing so, I accidentally surrendered my only copy of the receipt).

The second verse was as same as the first. The new PoGo had the same issue as the previous one. It would work just fine while on the AC, but would red-light as soon as it was unplugged.

Then, as in life, I got distracted with other more important and sometimes shinier things that held my attention and the PoGo sat on a shelf gathering dust

…

But I recently returned to the device with a different set of expectations.

Ok, so it’s not what I thought it was going to be.  So what if I can’t print on the go? How often would I actually be compelled to print a cell-cam snapshot on a bustling street corner anyway? Or want to finagle a USB cable between the 40D & PoGo at the beach?

Maybe just being a quirky little specialty printer with a tiny footprint was alright. It’s still small enough to bring with while traveling, even if I have to bring an extra set of cords along, allowing for adhesive photographic enhancement to journal entries while on location, or at least back at the hotel room.

It really is a fun little printer that arbitrarily gives unexpected results; a virtue that I hold dear in my Holgas & Brownie Hawkeye Flash. It prints stickers photos that look like an random amalgamation of cross-processing, soft focused, odd cropping, streaks, and other what-nots that could make a Diana blush.

So, I find myself printing 2×3 images again.

But only when I’m near an outlet.