Past generations kept precious keepsakes such as family photos and letters from friends in boxes to be brought out and admired occasionally. This kind of reminiscing has been made much harder by the digitization of our lives. It’s a lot less fun to scroll through old emails and photos on a screen.

Designer Pierpaolo Lazzarini and musician Giampaolo Scapigliati wondered what kind of keepsakes would be left to hold and admire after the current generation is gone. To create a new type of keepsake, the duo invented the Printeroid, a portable printing device that works with any Apple mobile device. The name is a nod to the revolutionary (for its time) Polaroid instant printing technology.

Printeroid can make hard copies of photographs, text messages, and any other type of document. Using an app they named PMS (Printeroid Messaging Service), users send documents or photos to the printer which can store rolls of paper up to 10 meters long. Printeroid prints on standard paper, sticky paper, or photographic film.

One of the many awesome features of the Printeroid is its ability to print out panoramic photos in one piece. The paper is only 2.7 inches wide so the photos may not be incredibly detailed, but they do bring back the tactile satisfaction of holding a treasured photo in your hands and preserving it for future generations.

In the age of purely digital communication, the Printeroid could be a way to preserve the text messages of a couple from their first meeting through the deep connection that forms. These long printed lines of text and pictures could very well fill the memory boxes of our children and grandchildren, giving them a glimpse into how we lived in the first few decades of the 21st century.

The post Screen Printing: Create Hard Copies of iPhone Memories first appeared on Gajitz.

Photo sharing moved almost entirely into the digital realm, but there’s still something special about pulling a snapshot out of your wallet to show off. Polaroid has created the best of both worlds with the Socialmatic camera: an instant print camera that also posts your images to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and other apps.

The Socialmatic camera prints out 2″ X 3″ images with Zink Zero Ink printing technology. They’re smudge-proof, tear-resistant, and water-resistant. But even if something were to happen to one of your picture print-outs, you’ll have a backup online.

Built-in wifi connects your Socialmatic to the internet. If you’re in a location with no wifi, the Socialmatic also connects to your mobile device via Bluetooth so it can upload from anywhere you get cell phone service.

Remarkably, the camera is also a tiny Android computer with a 4.5 inch touch screen, stereo speakers, and 4 GB of onboard storage. It lets you browse the internet and check email, though that kind of seems like Polaroid is stretching the features a little too far.

The 14 megapixel forward-facing camera is complemented by a smaller 2 megapixel backward-facing selfie lens. When it goes on sale in early 2015 it will retail for $299.

The post Polaroid’s New Camera Prints + Uploads Pics Instantly first appeared on Gajitz.

Instant photo cameras nearly disappeared into obscurity around the time digital cameras rose to prominence. Models like the popular OneStep line from Polaroid became part of the retro-chic movement, along with other film cameras like the Holga. Eventually, companies like Instagram completely appropriated the once-dead art form, and Fujifilm are continuing the tradition.

Fujifilm Japan recently announced the Instax Mini 90, an instant film camera that furthers the company’s obsession with retro-designed cameras. It delivers a photograph in seconds and has features like bulb exposure, double exposure and a 60mm f/12 lens.

The video for the Mini 90 stresses the phrase “neo-classic” as a selling point. It’s quite obviously geared toward social media-obsessed trend followers whose need for instant gratification has driven an entire lifestyle in the last decade (we won’t say the ‘h’ word, but you know who you are).

The post Instantly Retro: Fujifilm Has Yet Another New Old Camera first appeared on Gajitz.

Printers that turn your digital photographs into physical ones have existed for years, but this one from the Impossible Project has an intriguing difference: it’s actually a miniature instant photo lab. The Impossible Instant Lab uses just the light from your iPhone’s display to expose a slide of instant film.

The unique instant photo lab was created and developed by a group of committed instant photo enthusiasts. They bought the world’s last remaining Polaroid instant film factory in the Netherlands and went to work designing a device that could combine the magical beauty of instant photos with the modern habit of taking tons of iPhone photos.

As mentioned before, there is already an abundance of photo printers for turning your iPhone pics into physical photographs. But the pictures made by those printers lack the unique aesthetic appeal of the classic Polaroid. The Kickstarter project is in the process of raising $250,000 for its initial production run, and judging from the amount of money already raised, they’ll have no problem hitting their mark in the 27 fundraising days left.

The post The iPhone Photo Lab That Turns Digital Pics Into Real Ones first appeared on Gajitz.

We were sort of crushed when Polaroid announced that it would stop selling its iconic instant film, considering it the end of a very long and very fun era. But little did we know that they would come out with something that, though not quite the same, would still fill a void in our instant picture-loving souls.

The Z2300 Instant Digital Camera brings together the best of old technology and new technology. It’s a digital camera that lets you see the picture you’ve taken on an integrated screen. You can then crop, edit, and add effects to the pic instantly, right there on the camera.

When you’re satisfied with the picture, you can print a copy instantly – you know, kind of like the old-school Polaroids we loved for so long, but with ZINK Technology instead of the classic weirdly colored instant film. The Z2300 also keeps a digital copy of your pictures and lets you upload them to all sorts of sharing platforms. At $160, this 10-megapixel camera seems like a surprisingly good value.

The post Polaroid’s New Camera Blends the Best of Digital + Analog first appeared on Gajitz.