SnapJet: A portable, open source Polaroid printer for smartphones | Hacker News Reader

SnapJet: A portable, open source Polaroid printer for smartphones

snapjet.com

48 pointslhh41 comments

I think people here aren't getting what this is. It looks like it transfers the image from the phone to a polaroid film cartridge optically. It's basically a smartphone version of a Daylab enlarger.

Which is super-bleeding-cool, because there aren't many important moving parts not provided by the smartphone or the film cartridge. It's not a scanner and a printer. The only way to beam an image to it over bluetooth would be to embed a smartphone screen and backlight into it, which I gather it is not doing. It's taking an analog "contact print."

Let me start by saying I really like the idea of a portable color picture printer. That said the idea of scanning in a picture I have digitally to print it seems a roundabout way to approach this problem. A few google searches revealed this [0] which is a small printer made by Polaroid to do just that (Note: it's a little older and does not work with iPhone but does work with some Android phones). It's $130 (not though Amazon and not prime) and has 4.5 stars (I skimmed the low reviews and I'd bet SnapJet would suffer from the same issues: battery life, picture quality, streaking after a few uses). It would appear that Polaroid is no longer in the stand-alone mobile printer business as they don't list the product on their site and it's only on reseller/auction sites now.

I find it hard to believe that the team behind SnapJet can deliver a product as good for close to the same price as Polaroid. Also I'd bet that Polaroid had a good reason for pulling the plug on their mobile printers (Demand, quality issues, high printing costs, etc). This seems like a very high risk KS (not that there are a large number of "sure thing" KS projects but still).

Lastly I see no mention of printing over BT/BLE which is the only reason I would buy it.

[0] http://smile.amazon.com/Polaroid-CZA-20011B-Instant-Mobile-P...

> Lastly I see no mention of printing over BT/BLE which is the only reason I would buy it.

The Kickstarter page - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/snapjet/snapjet-a-slim-... - has more details:

"We've also included an OLED display, USB, and BLE connectivity. So all the tinkerers and photographers out there can control exposures, hack, and reprogram the SnapJet."

See my earlier reply on that sentence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8654227

Hey joshstrange, You can't print over bluetooth--this connectivity is for control of the printer's scanning mechanism. It also allows reprogramming or custom exposures. SnapJet uses an analog method of obtaining the image because it simplifies the device electronics and mechanics. This translates to ease of use and yields good picture quality. It also tackles compatibility issues. Compare its function to the impossible instant lab--this is a similar device that uses a larger lens system instead. SnapJet isn't meant to function exactly like a traditional printer, but instead as an extension for your smartphone to recreate the fun of Polaroid photography. We're also stressing the open source aspect. It's a fun gadget that works in a simple way so people can hack and improve upon it.

Alright so a bunch of people don't seem to understand how this thing works, and aren't reading the Kickstarter.

This is not actually a PRINTER. It's a photo paper exposer.

What's the difference? Printers work by somehow applying ink to paper. Photo paper works by already having the ink impregnated within it and exposing it to light causes the ink to become active and the result is that you get an image.

So the phone is an integral part of the process; without it you have no colored light source and thus, no printer.

Why did they use the word "printer" when it's not actually a printer in the technical sense of the word? Because the difference is lost on most people.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/printers.htm

EDIT: changed to a better link

I would buy one without the "screen scanner" because I'm an otherwise knowledgeable user and scanning the display sounds clunky and stupid.

It doesn't scan in the traditional sense of an office scanner does. This Snapjet doesn't uses a line of CCD to scan a digital picture and then print it on paper.

The kind of scan it does is simply to run a slit along the smartphone. The light from the smartphone that goes through the slit simply illuminates the light-sensitive front face of a Fuji Instax Mini instant film.

What this is doing is neither printing or scanning: it's transferring the image -in the optical sense- directly from the screen to the light-sensitive photo paper.

"... prints out a high resolution color image on Instax Mini or Polaroid 300PIF film. ..."

Access to Film is the weakness here. Polaroid used to be pretty cheap & widely available ~ <https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/polaroid> Then Polaroid stopped producing it.

Want to get that 5x4" old-school Polaroid look? try the "Impossible Instant black lab" ~ https://shop.the-impossible-project.com/shop/cameras/impossi... It uses the old 600 Polaroid format with new film chemistry. I love the way Impossible is improving the film. It's getting close to what the Polaroid reproduced at it's peak. cf <https://www.the-impossible-project.com/>

I love it, it is so retro and simple! I hope they will deliver an app for Windows phone as well! I just wonder how they can align the display on the device (if you have some less famous android phone) and how they can detect how much light exposes the film!

I'm a bit skeptical. I don't know about you but my smartphone screen isn't always super clean. And yes, you can clean it before using it, but I'd love to see how quality looks like in a closeup.

Disclaimer: co-founder of SnapJet

Hey comboy, SnapJet is resilient (to some degree) with respect to minor smudges. Naturally a clean screen would be best. We have some closeups on website and kickstarter page. http://kck.st/1vGjko0

Best, Ismail

So why use scanning over BT picture transfer or the like? Scanning an image you have a digital copy of feels on par with holding your laptop over a flatbed scanner to print an email...

Also how does this support phones like the iPhone 6/6+ or Nexus 6?

So I just looked on KS and found this response:

> @Abdul thanks for the question. Our optional app doesn't need to know that SnapJet is attached. All it has to do is display the desired image at the right scale and position - and SnapJet will scan/print it. This is part of what makes SnapJet so simple - any app can work with SnapJet as a print-source, just by displaying the desired photo.

> You can think of it as a photocopy machine, where the "paper" is the phone screen. The paper doesn't need to know that it is being copied.

So it sounds like you can use their app to display the image you want scaled to their scanner... But how do you position your 6/6+ so that it's lined up?

Hey joshstrange, SnapJet's top has a corner registration feature and you can tell the app what model your phone is to adjust the position/size.

Ok but my phone won't be able to fit flush with the scanner as the corner guards you have in your video/pictures would cause it to be 1/4" or so off the scanning surface. How do you account for that? Also I feel like phone cases are going to play hell with this.

Perhaps I should have read more carefully:

> We've also included an OLED display, USB, and BLE connectivity.

If so, that's really awesome, and I'm no more skeptical. I hope you'll be able to make your goal.

I am still skeptical, one sentence on KS about it doesn't really fill me with optimism. The following sentence:

> So all the tinkerers and photographers out there can control exposures, hack, and reprogram the SnapJet.

Makes me think that those connections (USB/BLE) are just for computer -> SnapJet. Also they don't say anything about it in their video. That's the kind of promise that's easy to edit out after you've got funded. I would be interested in a BLE printer of this size (open their app and select the image and have a share intent to throw any image to the app to print) but the scanner seems gimmicky and like it will result in fingerprints on your pictures or misaligned pictures.

EDIT: From FAQ:

>What will the optional app do? We are creating iOS and Android apps that will allow you to get the most out of SnapJet's technology. The app will resize your photo and position for a perfect transfer to the instant film inside SnapJet. It will also adjust your screen brightness, communicate with SnapJet's hardware, allow you to add effects, and we might even include some cool hacks for SnapJet like multiple exposure ;)

> It's completely free and we'll post the source code for all our hackers.

There is no mention of using BT/BLE for Phone -> SnapJet.

Well I do hope you will be able to print photos over bluetooth or at least USB (since android already can work as usb host IIRC?).

If it can't, then yes, I'm back to being skeptical.

Well, I am surely not social enough but my phone-to-paper picture usage involves mostly postcards and there are excellent apps for that already. It's so much easier to snap a picture on the phone click two buttons, a week later someone gets a postcard than printing and then sending it as a physical postcard.

why not just use NFC or bluetooth?

seems like a lot of additional engineering/hardware for worse quality. even the minor hassle of a cable connection would be worth it, no one is going to carry this thing around, it's gonna be on some desk somewhere where a dock or cable would easily be no problem.

Hi leeoniya,

Actually, I think the scanning approach actually simplifies things quite a bit. Let's see if I can explain this properly:

You can think of SnapJet as performing the same operation as holding a phone about 10 inches away from an old film camera, and opening and closing the shutter. Light comes out of the phone, and hits the film after being focused by a lense. The picture then develops from a chemical reaction based on the incident wavelengths of light. The novelty in SnapJet is simply that we reduce that 10 inches to 1mm - i.e. we focus the light using optical fibers rather than a traditional lense.

This actually makes the device super-low-tech. The optical fibers are just plastic, and so the device technically doesn't need any electronics whatsoever. The current printer we're kickstarting has batteries and a PCB in order to support Fuji's film cartridges (and make the user experience a little smoother). But we're imagining future versions that work entirely without batteries or motors and are ultra-slim, like 5-7mm.

Hope that makes more sense!

i consider this much more complicated than the couple hundred lines of code that it would take to simply send the image electronically, eliminating the need for cropping, straightening denoising and a whole lot of other corrections you need to do when scanning. it would not be as universal and you couldnt do it with older flip phones, but then again you cannot lay a flip phone face down, flat onto a scanning surface.

I don't think you're quite getting it. This is an analogue printer, there is no scanner, light from the display of the phone is used to expose photo sensitive paper.

ah, ic. interesting.

Could you please stop calling it "scanning"? It's not scanning anything, it's exposing a film.

A lot of people who read your product description (and your comments here) seem to think that it's an actual image scanner that creates a digital image and then prints it. You can help preventing that misunderstanding (and avoid all the questions about whether one can print via Bluetooth) by making more clear what your product actually is in the language you use.

I'd be interested in picking one up so I can print little pictures of my niece (and future nieces and nephews) on the fly for their enjoyment, but Dec 2015 is just a bit further away than I'd like.

Happy to pick one up when they're out for realsies though, hope you reach your funding goal!

LG PD239W Pocket Printer (BLE/NFC)[0]. How is SnapJet better than this?

[0] http://m.lg.com/us/cell-phone-accessories/lg-PD239W-pocket-p...

This looks like it could be a fun party gag, if it was about the size of an iPhone or smaller and very cheap.

But at this size and price point? I don't see the appeal over one of the mobile dye-sub printers, some of which are smaller than this device.

Wouldn't you get a better resolution though with a portable dye-sub printer, as theres no intermediary optical process.

To clarify this, I've got a Canon one that uses C M Y layers if I recall correctly and outputs at a resolution of 300PPI.

Hey deutronium, dye sub printers and SnapJet have different use cases; dye sub printers take ink and aren't something to throw into a bag to take with you. SnapJet is more of a fun gadget for Smartphones than a professional photo printer. It uses film cartridges and makes interfacing with a smartphone really easy. Cheers! Isaac

Got you, I've just had a look over some of the examples, they do look impressive!

Basically: fund this idea if you want the 7mm future device to happen because at this moment the dye sub printer looks superior. Some dye sub printers have the ink and the paper together in one cartridge. If not, then you can have multiple paper size -- think stickers. While larger than a smartphone, they can have a comparable footprint to a 7" tablet, for eg. compare the Canon CP 910 at 178 x 128 x 60.5 mm to a Nexus 7 tablet at 198.5 x 120 x 10.45 mm.

I love the idea, but the polaroid paper is 0.75 a print. I see people buying, using a few times, then shelving. If it was somehow possible to get that price down to 0.20 or even 0.10 per print this would take over the world.

There seems to be a lot of comments on how this product seems dated. It prints polaroids. Polaroids are dated. Relax, it's fun low tech.

shown with the iPhone 4, what's up with that, it's really a contact printer (as in the old days with an enlarger, except the phone's screen is the light source)

bigger screens like the iPhone 6 will crop since it's a contact print.

The guy shakes the fuji instant print, reminiscent of polaroid, but no longer makes any difference, kind of funny.

the results will be horrible looking and cropped. Waste of time.

Fun idea. I love it when people think outside of the electronics... and anything that helps keep polaroid film around gets my vote.

Just hit 500 backers (and 42% funded) on Kickstarter!

can I use Bluetooth to beam the picture into SnapJet instead of scanning it in?. Coz, the when scanned, the brightness depends on how bright my screen is, proximity sensor off, smudges on screen, misaligned phone, possible screen interruptions like incoming SMS, notifications, statusbar, etc. BT is clean and since u are targeting smartphones, its hard to find a phone without BT

That's the big unanswered question, I like the idea but scanning seems dated and prone to issues (especially since I have a larger phone that wouldn't fit in those corner guards). Ideally I could get a BT/BLE-only model for cheaper but they won't be offering that. Best case it can scan or use the optional app to do BT/BLE transfer.

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