Digital Home Thoughts: Polaroid's New Instant Camera, The PoGo: Instant Failure

It almost seems a shame to pick on a brand that's on its last legs, but when I stopped by the Polaroid booth at CES 2009 in January, I couldn't help but feel baffled by the Polaroid PoGo they were showing. For those of you that haven't seen this rather curious piece of hardware, it's their answer to Polaroid instant cameras slowly but surely going away (Polaroid announced they're not making the film for them any longer). The PoGo is a digital camera with a built-in printer. If your first thought is "Whoa, sounds big!" you're right on the money.

The PoGo is a chunky camera that looks like it came straight out of 1999. You might be able to forgive the size if the functionality was off-the-charts awesome, but it's not: the image above is a scan I did of a print-out that I received from the PoGo camera. As a digital camera, the images I saw on the screen looked quite bad. As a printer, they looked even worse. The "secret" to in-camera printing is the Zink Photo Paper, which is heat-activated, and cranks out small 2 inch by 3 inch photos that double as stickers. Yes, that's right, stickers.

I might be move forgiving of the PoGo in it's printer-only form, but considering it can only print out 15 images before the batteries go dead, I have to scratch my head and ask "What's the point?". If this was a $49 product aimed at kids, maybe this would get some traction, but considering the cost of the consumables and the atrocious battery life, I can't see it very successful there either. Who's going to buy this thing?

I don't know what the future holds for Polaroid, but if the PoGo is the best they can do, they should pack it in and exit the market while the brand still has a few shreds of dignity left.