Printing stickers with Polaroid's Zip Instant Photoprinter is too much fun

I love being able to hold pictures in my hands, but I love being able to stick my pictures on things even more.

Sticker pictures are back, and they're more fun to print out than they were before thanks to Polaroid's $130 pocket-sized Zip Instant Photoprinter.

Before digital cameras, before cellphone cameras and before Facebook and Instagram, there was the photo booth. And then for a short period of time in the mid to late 1990s, photo booths from Asia that printed "sticker pics" became really popular worldwide.

It was a much simpler time. Sticker pics let you express yourself and show off your goofy side. They were a precursor to selfies, if you will.

You and a few friends would cram into a tiny photo booth and select frames and borders and make faces into the camera. Afterwards, you'd divvy the stickers up and slap them onto your notebook, CD player, pager (if you were so lucky to own one) or other personal items.

In recent years, instant film cameras have seen somewhat of a resurgence in popularity. Despite the unlimited number of digital photos we can now snap and share immediately with our phones, people are falling in love with pictures that they can hold in their hands again.

I'm as guilty as everyone else. Since I bought my Fujifilm Instax Mini 90 last year, I've taken hundreds of instant pictures. I bring it with me whenever there's a party, wedding or social event. There's still something delightful about watching instant pics develop and then giving them out to people as gifts. Look in my wallet and you'll find around six instant pics tucked inside that are rotated with new ones every couple of months.

But as great as instant film cameras are, they're still analog gadgets. Polaroid's Zip Instant Photoprinter takes your most used camera — your phone — and lets you print your pics out on the fly.

Ink-less prints

The digital printer is no larger than a small portable hard drive or battery pack and weighs only 0.41 pounds. I tested the white model (it also comes in black, magenta and cyan), and it's sleek with rounded corners and edges. Polaroid's iconic rainbow stripe runs down the front and back. There's a single power button and Micro USB port for charging and that's it. If not for the rainbow stripe, it could pass for an Apple product.

Slide the top cover off and you'll gain access to the paper tray. The Photoprinter prints pics using Polaroid's ZINK Zero Ink paper (2- x 3-inch stickers). ZINK paper comes in packs of 50 for $25, which works out to 50 cents per shot. It sounds like a lot, but compare that to Fujifilm Instax mini film, which is anywhere from $1 to $1.50 a shot, and it's peanuts.

What's ZINK paper, you ask? It's special paper with colored crystals embedded inside. When heat from the printer is applied onto it, the crystals activate and the photos develop. ZINK paper is the digital equivalent of instant film, without the downsides of having to keep it stored in the dark for fear of accidental exposure. And since the technology is not like an inkjet printer that applies ink on top of paper, you'll never have to buy ink cartridges or deal with smudges.

The Photoprinter isn't Polaroid's first stab at digital printing. A few years ago, I tried Polaroid's Z2300 instant digital camera, which has a built-in ZINK printer, but I thought the quality of the prints was crummy.

This time around, instead of a camera with a built-in printer, the company's simply selling a printer that connects to your smartphone or tablet and prints out pictures from there.

So easy to use

Image: Mashable, Miles Goscha

The Photoprinter connects to iOS devices with Bluetooth and to Android devices with either Bluetooth or NFC. I tested the Photoprinter with an iPhone 6, HTC One M9 and Galaxy S6, and I had no real troubles pairing them to the printer.

Printing pictures is very easy to do. Everything is handled through the free Polaroid Zip app. The app itself isn't the best-designed one, though. It looks a little dated with its brushed metal aesthetic, kind of like something circa 1999 when the brushed metal look was all the rage.

The Polaroid Zip app works, but it's not the easiest to use.

Image: Mashable, Screenshot by Raymond Wong

With the app, you can make a quick print either by taking a pic or selecting one from your photo gallery; make collages; create a quick business card; and edit pictures by adding filters, text, fun frames/borders and other icons and emoji.

The editing process can be tricky; it's not fully thought out. For instance, you can't use a pinch gesture to shrink and enlarge text or emoji, and you can't turn them to rotate. Several Mashable editors kept trying to use gestures until I explained to them the correct way to make edits. You have to press and hold on these tool icons that pop in the corner like so:

Imperfect prints full of charm

ZINK paper prints aren't going to blow you away with crispness or clarity — actually, the color is pretty off and is darker than what you see in the app before printing — but it's really good for a pocket printer.

It's tough to notice, but there are some subtle differences in print quality depending on what smartphone/tablet you use. Here's a case where having more megapixels and a better camera that takes pictures with less image noise is desirable.

Print quality is especially noticeable when you print out selfies; prints from the iPhone 6's 2-megapixel front-facing camera look worse than selfies from the 5-megapixel front camera on the GS6.

It's not a deal-breaker at all, to tell you the truth. In fact, I quite like the somewhat lower resolution for some prints; it feels like you're getting something as imperfect as a picture developed from film. The grain in some pics actually gives them more charm and character.

It takes a little over a minute for pictures to print out — 30 seconds or so to send the data to the printer and another 30 seconds or so for the printer to warm up and print. Yes, I know, a whole minute, but it's not like instant film doesn't take a minute or two to develop; there's that same sort of excitement in waiting for the unknown.

More fun than Instagram

If my headline didn't clue you in from the start, the Photoprinter is just so much fun to use. It's a little pricey at $130, the battery lasts only about an hour for around 25 prints, and the app can make me grind my teeth a few times, but the overall product is delightful.

We all take hundreds (or like me, thousands) of pictures with our smartphones, but how many of those do we actually look at again? The value of a smartphone pic posted to Instagram is quickly lost to the sands of time. That selfie you posted 15 minutes ago is only memorable until you post your next one.

ZINK paper includes sticker adhesives on the back — perfect for personalizing your stuff like how I did to this MacBook.

Image: Mashable, Raymond Wong

Not only does the Photoprinter give your smartphone pics tangibility, but it also increases the value of each pic printed. Stick them on the back of your phone or on your laptop lid or on your fridge and you'll remember those moments and cherish them more. They're daily reminders of the good times.

In today's ephemeral digital lifestyle, a physical photo is worth more than a million digital ones.

Polaroid Zip Instant Photoprinter The Good

Sleek, lightweight design • Cheap ZINK sticker paper • Works with iOS and Android • Lots of funky frames, emoji and images to overlay on pics

The Bad

Occasional connectivity issues • Weak battery

The Bottom Line

The Polaroid Zip Instant Photoprinter is a little pricey at $130, but damn it if it's not a whole lot of fun to print your smartphone pics.

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