Long before anybody was thinking about digital cameras, Polaroid invented instant photography. Shoot a picture, and 60-seconds later you had a snapshot in hand. It's the archetypical Polaroid experience. The Polaroid PoGo Instant Mobile Printer ($150 street) largely recreates that experience for the digital photography age.

Aside from the obvious change to digital technology, the one big difference between the Polaroid experience then and now is that it's not about the camera. It's about the printer. The premise is that many, if not most, people are walking around with their own cameras, often in the form of cell phones, so all that's missing is a printer. Polaroid has added the missing piece, so you can print from PictBridge cameras, as well as from phones and other devices that can print via Bluetooth.

A big part of the attraction is gadget appeal, pure and simple—which is to say, the printer should appeal to gadget geeks of any age. The printer I tested is literally a black box with sliver metal highlights. (Polaroid says it will be available in other colors as well, with some colors exclusively available at specific chains.) It weighs just 8 ounces, including the rechargeable battery, and is small enough to fit in a pocket, at 0.9- by 4.7- by 2.8-inches (HWD). The borderless photos are 2- by 3-inches, with a peel off layer covering a sticky back so you can attach the photos to any handy surface.

The printer is built around ZINK technology, which was unveiled in 2007 at Demo 07, and shown again earlier this year at CES. Briefly, ZINK technology, which stands for zero ink, embeds clear dye crystals in photo paper, and then uses heat to activate color in the crystals. The paper itself includes a clear polymer overcoat that helps protect the image and makes the photos feel more like flexible plastic than like traditional photo paper. Even so, the paper has the same look as traditional glossy photo paper and a similar thickness.

By essentially including the ink in the paper, ZINK technology makes setup trivial. Simply open the paper tray cover, drop in the paper, and close the cover. Assuming the battery is charged, you're ready to print. Not so incidentally, Polaroid says a fully charged battery is good for 15 photos, which should be enough in most cases to let you treat the printer much like a cell phone, taking it with you during the day, and recharging at night, as needed. As you might expect, the printer comes with an AC adaptor that will both let you charge the battery and print while the battery is being charged.

I ran my tests using both a PictBridge camera and a notebook computer that supports Bluetooth. It worked as promised in both cases, taking about a minute to print a photo over the PictBridge connection and from 1 minute 35 seconds to 1:57 per photo for printing over the Bluetooth connection.

Output quality is far from ideal, or even what you'd expect from your local drug store. Colors in more than half of my test photos were noticeably off, shifting some light colors to yellow, some shades of red to purple, and making some photos seem faded or washed out.

That said, however, quality that would be unacceptable in a 4 by 6 isn't necessarily unacceptable in a 2- by 3-inch photo that's meant for a wallet or for literally sticking on a refrigerator door, desktop monitor, scrap book, or school locker. I'd call the quality good enough for the intended purpose. It helps too that the photos are both water and scratch resistant. Cost per photo is currently as low as 33.3 cents if you buy them in packs of 30 sheets.

A more significant issue is whether you have a camera phone that works with the printer. Even some phones that work with Bluetooth headsets can't print. Polaroid has wisely gathered compatibility information on its Web site so you can find out before buying the printer if your phone will work with it. (Go to www.polaroid.com/pogo and choose Compatibility.)

If you don't have a compatible phone, you can still print from a PictBridge camera. Unfortunately, though, having to connect a cable between the camera and printer is a lot less impressive than simply turning the printer on, giving a print command from your phone or notebook, and watching the photo emerge.

As already suggested, he Polaroid printer's attractiveness lies squarely in the realm of gadget appeal. What's not clear is whether it will lose its luster once the novelty wears off, or whether it—and printers like it—will become a standard accessory for the digital age. The safe bet is that the reality will fall somewhere between the two extremes. But in any case, the Polaroid PoGo Instant Mobile Printer delivers what it promises: the freedom to print a picture at any time and any place with ease.

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