At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Our Verdict
It’s hard to know who the Pop is for really. If you want to use it as an instant camera, there are better ones out there for half the price, using either Zink or film. If you want to use a printer for photos from your phone, then once again there are better ones out there for half the price. If you really want one device that handles both then it might appeal, but you’re still stuck paying a serious premium for the larger square prints.
Best Prices Today: Polaroid Pop
The Polaroid Pop is part of Polaroid line of instant cameras and printers that use the Zink format – zero-ink – to quickly print small-scale digital photos – as opposed to the genuine film prints you’ll find from Polaroid Originals (a separate company, confusingly) cameras like the OneStep+ .
Zink lacks some of the charm of proper film, but there are advantages too: it’s cheaper, for one, but it also lets you apply a range of filters and effects to photos ahead of printing, and use the camera to create gifs and video too. Since the Pop then prints in the classic square Polaroid format – complete with an oversized bottom border – it’s clear it’s trying to strike a middle-ground between nostalgia and modernity.
Price & availability
The Polaroid Pop retails for £199.99/$199.99 , which is a steep starting point. It’s more than double the smaller £89.99/$89.99 Polaroid Snap , and more than almost every real film instant camera made by either Polaroid Originals or Fujifilm Instax.
The prints aren’t all that cheap either. One of the benefits of Zink cameras is that the paper is usually less costly than the film used by Instax, but at £9.99/$9.99 for a pack of 10 prints , this is about the same price. Prices drop as you buy more, but not by enough to really justify the quality compromises involved in Zink over film.
Bright ‘n’ chunky
To look at it, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the Polaroid Pop is a toy. While the main body is black the bottom quarter is a solid pop of bright colour – yellow in our case, though there are six available – with an optional matching thick plastic wrist strap.
The front has a large cutout for the lens, with flash next to it, though is otherwise uninterrupted, while the back boasts a small touchscreen and a big red shutter button – continuing the toy-esque feel. Paper is loaded from underneath the coloured section, which pops off and holds in place magnetically, and prints come out from the top.
At 454g the Pop is surprisingly heavy, and at 15cm tall it isn’t especially compact either – a necessity of the larger Polaroid prints. Still, it means you’ll definitely need to make space to lug this thing around with you, and you’re not likely to forget that it’s on you.
The other big downside of the design is that the glossy black plastic picks up both smudges and micro-abrasions like anybody’s business. Within just a few days of using the Pop it’s already coated in smudge marks and tiny scratches – just from carrying it around in a rucksack. The glossy finish is pretty slippy too, so you might want to make sure you use that wrist strap.
Photos and filters
How about the actual camera though? It’s safe to say that in terms of pure photo quality, the Pop is unlikely to wow anyone. Colours are fairly muted, detailing is fairly poor, and it seriously struggles with either low-light or moving subjects.
All of that is covered up to some extent by the format of course – at just a few inches across, the prints will hide a lot of the camera’s failings by virtue of their sheer size. They bring in their own issues though, with the Zink printing occasionally introducing streaking and colour banding, while washing colours out even more in the process. It’s also slow, and makes a succession of juddering, grinding noises as it goes about printing shots.
You might think that low resolutions and faded colours are just par for the course with instant cameras, and to some extent that’s true. But there are few we’ve reviewed that seem to struggle this much with colour saturation or blurring with moving subjects, and it severely limits the Pop’s potential appeal – especially at £200/$200.
Where the Pop stands out slightly is in its additional features. For one, you can add a variety of filters, borders, and stickers to your images to liven them up a little. Serious photographers won’t take much interest, but kids will find the options fun, and it could add an extra quirk to photos if you want the camera for a party or wedding.
You can also use the Pop to create gifs or shoot video, with a similar range of potential effects. The problem here is that it’s hard to know why anyone would. It’s not like you can print them, so all you can do is send them to your phone – but odds are your phone camera will already blow the Pop away, and there are free apps with way more options for special effects.
Wobbly Wi-Fi
You can also use the built-in Wi-Fi to send photos and videos from the Pop to your phone or tablet using the free Android and iOS app, or in reverse – to send existing photos to the Pop to use it as a printer. You can even add the Pop’s various borders and filters to those photos before you print.
Using Wi-Fi as opposed to Bluetooth means that transfers are pretty quick, but the process is fiddly – you’ll have to disconnect your phone from the regular Wi-Fi and connect it to the Pop’s own Wi-Fi network to transfer any images or videos, which will take a minute or two.
If you want to post one of the Pop’s photos on Instagram, for example, you’ll have to connect your phone to the Pop Wi-Fi, use the Pop’s own controls to send the photo, hit accept on your phone, then disconnect from the Pop Wi-Fi and go back to your regular connection, and then finally share it online. Or you could just take the photo on your phone in the first place.
Verdict
It’s hard to know who the Pop is for really. If you want to use it as an instant camera, there are better ones out there for half the price, using either Zink or film. If you want to use a printer for photos from your phone, then once again there are better ones out there for half the price. If you really want one device that handles both then it might appeal, but you’re still stuck paying a serious premium for the larger square prints.
The chunky, colourful aesthetic might appeal to kids, and it could be a great purchase for pre-teens who don’t have their own smartphone but want to play around with photos and filters. But at £200/$200 – and more for prints – it’ll be a tough sell for parents. Not least because, again, you could buy another model for half the price.
Best Prices Today: Polaroid Pop
Author: Dominic Preston, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Previously Tech Advisor’s Deputy Editor, Dom covers everything that runs on electricity, from phones and laptops to wearables, audio, gaming, smart home, and streaming.
Recent stories by Dominic Preston:
- Instax Square SQ40 review
- Kodak Step Instant Camera review
- Kodak Step Instant Printer review
At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Portable design
- Affordable
- Easy to use
Cons
- A few bugs in the app
- Charges via Micro-USB
Our Verdict
The Kodak Step Printer is a reliable, affordable instant photo printer. It doesn’t do anything its rivals don’t, but it costs less and has few flaws to undermine its appeal.
Best Prices Today: Kodak Step Instant Printer
The Kodak Step Instant Printer – not to be confused with the similarly named Kodak Step Instant Camera – is a cheap and cheerful Zink printer that can connect to your phone to print your favourite shots on compact sticky-backed Zink prints.
There are plenty of other similar Zink printers out there, and the Kodak Step doesn’t do anything revolutionary that the rest don’t. But it’s cheap, compact, and gives you plenty of easy editing options – making this one of the better options in a crowded field.
Design and build
- Simple plastic design
- Range of cheery colours
- Compact
Kodak has kept things simple with the Step printer.
This is a compact plastic brick, small enough to slip into a pocket or handbag. Available in white, black, blue, or pink, there are few flourishes to the design outside of your choice of colour.
The only thing that really stands out is a small black-and-yellow stripe on either end. This is just a sticker though – which on the upside means you can peel it off if you’re not a fan, but unfortunately means it’s also likely to peel itself off with sufficient wear and tear.
There are two LEDs for power and charging, one button to turn the printer off and on, and that’s honestly about it. When you want to load paper to print, you simply slide the back of the body off and load in the prints – it’s simple, quick, and pretty difficult to get wrong.
App and features
- Easy to pair with free smartphone app
- Edit photos and create collages
- A little buggy
Almost everything you do with the Kodak Step is controlled through the free app, available on iOS or Android. You can set up an account with Kodak, but this is optional – everything works fine without one.
The first step is pairing the printer to the app, but this is easy enough. They connect over Bluetooth, and in less than a minute I had the app connected to the printer and ready to go.
Images can be selected from your device’s gallery, or you can connect the app to your Facebook, Instagram, or Google photo libraries for more options.
Once you pick an image, there’s a wealth of options. You can just print it as it, either in landscape or portrait format, with the option to either print the full image with a border or crop it in if it’s not in the exact aspect ratio of the Zink prints (most of your photos won’t be).
But you can also edit images. This can be as simple as applying an Instagram-style filter, or you can get more complex and tweak brightness, hue, or colour temperature, or add on colourful frames, stickers, text, or drawings. You can also create collages with multiple photos in one print – but bear in mind that due to the size of the paper, each image may end up pretty tiny.
I’ve mostly been impressed with the Kodak Step Prints app, which is well laid out – and far simpler to use than its strangely laborious step-by-step tutorial process would suggest.
That said, it’s not perfect. For one there are some odd choices, like the fact that the most detailed set of image hue sliders appear only on the ‘Print preview’ page of the app – and not, as you’d expect, in the ‘Edit photo’ section.
There are bugs to sort out too. The app has a tendency to freeze at times, especially when loading a photo to edit. The ‘Print preview’ brightness slider also seems to be entirely broken, raising brightness drastically if you so much as tap on the bar, with no option to lower it below the image’s starting point.
Print quality
- Small 2×3” Zink prints
- Sticky-backed
- Decent detail and colour
The Kodak Step prints onto ink-free Zink prints – a popular format for instant printers and cameras in recent years.
The key benefits to Zink are that the prints themselves are cheap and quick to process, the printer doesn’t need ink cartridges, and that each print is actually sticky-backed – so you can peel off the back layer and turn any photo print into a sticker.
There are two real downsides. One is size – at 2×3”, Zink prints are tiny. That’s part of why the printer itself is so portable of course, so it’s not all bad. But still, these are dinky, and too small to really display anywhere – they’re better suited to making collages or tucking into a wallet.
The bigger concern is quality. This isn’t bad by Zink standards, preserving a fair amount of detail from images and printing at a respectable colour range. Still, a little is lost from every photo, and there’s none of the charm or style you’ll find on an instant film printer like the Instax Mini Link .
Battery life
- Battery for up to 25 prints
- Charges via Micro-USB
On a full charge, the Kodak Step can apparently print up to 25 prints – I didn’t have that many to test with so can’t confirm, but it did happily make it through a full pack of Zink paper, with lots of standby time, without complaint.
The one small disappointment is that when it comes to charging, you have to use a Micro-USB cable. This is getting to be a pretty old charging standard now, and it’s plausible that you won’t really own or use any other Micro-USB products at this point.
Kodak does include a cable for you to plug into any existing USB charger, but still – it’s a bit annoying that this couldn’t use the more recent and universal USB-C standard.
Price and availability
Zink paper is relatively affordable too, though still costs around 50p/50c per sheet – less than Instax prints, but enough that you won’t want to burn through prints with abandon.
Make sure to check out our guide to the best instant printers to see how the competition stack up, or the best instant cameras if you want to take photos rather than just print them (many do both).
Verdict
The Kodak Step Printer is hardly a reinvention of the instant printer, but it’s a good example of the form.
It’s small, compact, and feels durable, with decent battery life and an easy print process. The associated app is simple too, with quick pairing and a range of options to alter your images – though I did encounter a couple of bugs and issues along the way.
Best of all, at the time of writing this runs a little cheaper than most of its rivals while doing fundamentally the same thing – enough to make it an easy option to recommend.
Best Prices Today: Kodak Step Instant Printer
Author: Dominic Preston, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Previously Tech Advisor’s Deputy Editor, Dom covers everything that runs on electricity, from phones and laptops to wearables, audio, gaming, smart home, and streaming.
Recent stories by Dominic Preston:
- Instax Square SQ40 review
- Kodak Step Instant Camera review
- Instax Square SQ1 review
