Christmas is nearly here, and with it comes the snapping of a million never-to-be shared photos. So, instead of promising your friends and family that you’ll e-mail pictures, or trying to teach your mom how to use shared Photo Streams, or dicking around with SD cards and sneakernet, why not just make some good, old-fashioned prints?
And don’t worry – you won’t have to touch a computer.
At one time, deep back in the swirling mists of time, Polaroid was like the Apple of photography, not only making the best stuff but also inventing new ways to do things. Now, the brand is nothing but a label slapped onto a bunch of crap by the current owner.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing amazing going on in the analog instant film world. Take a look at the Impossible Project’s FPU (Film Processing Unit), an amazing gadget that marries your iPhone to real, instant analog photos.
Small, wifi-enabled with the ability to print from tablets and smartphones, low-cost printing, equipped with a touchscreen, relatively inexpensive, fast…looks like a shopping list for the perfect printer, right? And that’s what Brother might have in their just-launched MFC-J4510DW, a sleek printer with Google Cloud Print connectivity and a price tag of $200 (though I’d love an explanation as to why Brother has stuck with alphabet-soup product names while its competitors have moved on to printers with names like “Artisan” and “Envy”).
You’ve got an iPad. You were so taken with this magical device that you decided to write the next great American novel that doesn’t involve sparkling vampires using Pages or another word processing app for the iPad. One problem: How to print it.
The Brother MFC-J825DW is one of the latest Brother printers to join HP, Lexmark, Epson and Canon as a capable Airprint printer. So how does it work with the iPad?
Ahh, Polaroid – how far you have fallen. Once a true icon, an essential tool for photographers and a medium for many artists, as well as being the only way to take dirty photos without getting arrested at the processing lab.
Now you are stuck licensing your name and Logo to any cowboy who wants to stick a crappy ZINK (zero-ink) printer inside a box with a cellphone camera.
You have an office full of cubicle jockeys, and you have a network full of printers. And a lot of your workers come to the office with iPads and iPhones. Now, I hate printers, but even I realize that people need to put things on paper from time to time. And even a printer lover doesn’t want to re-equip the whole office with AirPrint-ready machines.
Thankfully, you don’t have to. The Lantronix xPrintServer will convert the whole network for you.
If you think about it, printers are probably the worst-designed gadgets in our homes (unless you own the same awful Samsung Behold as I do). But despite the mythical advance of the paperless office, nobody has been able to kill them off. Until now. A new survey says that the iPad has finally doomed the printer, and is even saving trees.
For years, you’ve always been able to buy a Mac and get a $100 rebate for a free printer from Apple. That is no longer the case. The “Buy a Mac, get a free printer” promotion has officially been discontinued by Apple starting today, January 17th.
Till now, HP has held a huge advantage over it’s printer rivals when it comes to printing from the iPad — because even though rivals have made strides with their own apps (like Epson’s slick iPrint app) HP’s printers remain the only ones with AirPrint, which is tied directly to iOS and allows printing from within apps, without having to use an intermediary app (eg iPrint).
London based design consultancy BERG have surpassed themselves with their latest idea, simply called Little Printer.
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