Travel Printer

Something I’ve always wanted to do is journal with photos when I take road trips.  I love journaling to capture the moments in life.  And I have always wanted to have a travel journal.  But I just can’t get excited about journaling when I don’t have visuals to go along with it.  I’ve always wanted to have a little printer to capture those moments easily.  I had been thinking about buying an Epson PictureMate Charm, as they seem reasonably priced and reasonably sized to actually travel with.  I hadn’t bought it yet because I just wasn’t sure if I would actually want to tote it along on vacation.  While most of my vacationing is road trips, I like to pack as light as possible.  Then one day a few weeks ago I saw on Instagram that Karyn had a tiny little printer she was using to journal.  I knew that was what I needed.  I went online and researched and knew in just a few minutes that it would be perfect for me.  So I bought one!  I am now the proud owner of a Polaroid PoGo.  I thought I’d talk a little about it since I had so many questions about it myself and also from others when I was posting about it on Instagram. 

The number one thing I love about it is that there is no ink required.  All I need are the little sheets of 2x3” thermal paper made especially for this.  You can load 10 sheets at a time and it works out to about $0.40/sheet.  Also, the back removes from these and they are sticky.  So that combined with no ink makes it a great value to me.  And easy to travel with.  So to get started, you remove your printer from the box and plug it in to charge.  Once it has a charge you should be able to print quite a few prints from it and it has a day or so of stand-by.  I haven’t really put this to the test yet myself, but at this point it’s not a big deal to just plug it in.  It’s really easy to get going.  You just lift the lid, pop the paper in (with the special blue sheet on the bottom) and close the lid and you’re ready. 

It’s a Bluetooth device and so you will need Bluetooth to print to it.  It is not readily able to print to from the iPhones.  If you have an iPhone you know how Apple likes to lock them down.  If you do have an iPhone (like I do) and it happens to be jailbroken, you can download an app from the Cydia store for $10 that will allow you to print your photos over Bluetooth to this printer.  It’s called Celeste, and that’s what I did.  Works like a charm.  (I should note I’m not on iOS 5.0.1 yet, still 4.2.8…so not sure how it’s working with the update yet.)  If you happen to have a Droid phone, then just print to Bluetooth, no special program required.  My husband has a Droid, so we tested it out with his phone.  (FYI – jailbreaking your phone is not illegal at this time in the US.)  This screen shot is when I was in a photo via the iPhone photo app that comes preinstalled on the iPhones.  Normally the “Send via Bluetooth” is not available on the options screen.  If you happen to have a Mac or a computer with Bluetooth (or a Bluetooth dongle for your computer) then you can also print from that to the printer.  But Bluetooth is the only way you can print to this thing.  There is no hooking it up via USB to print to it.  Which of course would kind of defeat the purpose of this cute little printer.

Something I had read about and noticed was that around the 3rd print you will see some streaking on the photos sometimes.  You may also see this if you haven’t used the printer in a few days.  The suggestions I found said to just run that blue piece of paper that came with your paper pack through the printer again at start-up.  All you need to do is put it in the bottom of the print tray, turn the printer on and it will spit it out automatically for you.  I had streaking on my third print, so ran the sheet through and printed again and the print had no streaking. 

I’m printing to it about once a day, so I just put the blue sheet in when I’m ready to print and have it run through first and the prints all come out fine.

Slightly misleading on the Polaroid site about the PoGo is the quality of prints you will get.  They show this perfectly balanced color photo.  That is not what you will get.  You’re photo will have a definite Polaroid-tint to it just like the instant Polaroid images of the past.  Which personally, I love.  For journaling it’s perfect for me.  I’m always editing my photos to that vintage look anyways. 

As I said above, the sheets have a sticky back which makes it perfect for journaling on the go. 

And I’ve been having lots of fun with casual journaling of my photos everyday.  I can’t wait for a road trip!

UPDATE

So after talking with Kaye about how she prints to her printer I had to give it a go for myself.  That evening after I did this initial post I updated my phone to the iOS 5.0.1 and did the jailbreak on it…and of course Celeste is not working with the new iOS.  But it looks like they are working on the update for it…at least at last tweet.  So for the time being I thought I might be stuck not printing to my PoGo (sad day).  But, after talking with Kaye, I now have a solution!  So one of the ways she prints to her PoGo is to connect her camera directly to the printer via it’s USB cable.  I have the Canon 60D which allows for printing via the camera interface and it worked like a charm.  I’m so excited.  So as long as I have a decent print to begin with, I get a great print from the printer.  Very happy about this!  Printing directly from my camera would make me just as happy as printing from my phone on the road trip.  Either way, I don’t need a computer! 

Next on my list to try…uploading a photo from my camera to the iPad, editing on the iPad and then printing to the PoGo.  Either via Celeste (I haven’t updated the iPad in a long time, so should work on there for now) or by putting the image back on my camera’s SD card and then printing from the camera interface.  Not sure how all of that will work.  I’m guessing I’ll need to find an app that will allow me to put photos from my iPad back onto the camera’s SD card.  I’ll be sure to post about that if it works out.