Polaroid Originals announced its first Polaroid printer today — the Polaroid Lab — allowing you to print photos taken on your phone.
The Lab, an update to Impossible Project’s Instant Lab from seven years ago, has a camera inside with three lenses that, essentially, take a photo of a photo that’s on a user’s phone. It then optimizes the image for film and prints it out. It’s supposed to work with the iPhone 6 and up and “most” Android devices. It charges over Micro USB, with Polaroid saying one charge should last a month. It’ll cost $100 when it’s eventually released later this year, and it accepts any film, except the SX-70.
The Lab requires users to have the Polaroid Originals app installed on their phone, from which they can tinker with settings, like exposure and color correction. In the beta app, those settings aren’t visually represented, so you’re just playing with a setting without knowing how it’ll affect the actual print. (It’s unclear if this will change when the Lab is released.) You can also break one image up into a collage spread across up to nine prints, however that collage isn’t seamless and the big white borders around each print take up a lot of image real estate.
Polaroid included other, more tech-oriented features that are already built into other photo printers, like the ability to assign a video to a photo. That feature lets you hold the Polaroid Originals app over the print to make a video show up.
By Ashley Carman
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/10/20857444/polaroid-originals-lab-photo-print-phone-launch