Customer Reviews

Polaroid P-500IR Digital Photo Printer

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

What's not on the web site, and which I discovered only after buying it and opening it and some paper: while any size Compact Flash card will apparently work, this printer will accept only 32 meg Smart Media cards and smaller. Since I have (and need!) a 128 meg card for my Fuji 4700, the printer is useless to me--all I get is a card error message. It's a pity, because the price is right & it seems like a delightful toy.

This printer does not work with 64MB and 128MB Smart Media cards. I verified this on the Polaroid website (deeply buried, of course!)

After a day of taking digital photos, I always have to rush home and print them. Now that slight problem is being solved with instant printers! With Polaroid's brand name and cheap price on this printer, I had to get it and try it.

And wow, I'm impressed. This package comes with everything you need to get started! Even an extra adapter and film so you can print right out of the box. The setup is easy and the instructions are made so you can stick it on the printer if you forget. What's great is that the printer accepts BOTH CF and SM cards. Now you can give photos away to people and they will be surprised at how you printed them so fast and because the picture source is from a digital camera you can select what photos you wanted printed and how many times.

The quality of the photos are superb just like those instant Polaroids everyone used to have, this prints a smaller rectangular verison with the photo about the size of a credit card; great wallet prints! The coloring of the film however seems to be a bit more on the magenta side if you dont have long-distance flash. Other than that, the printer itself requires no batteries and has a convenient strap so you can carry it everywhere you go. The printer is shaped nicely you can hold in your hand and the weight is light enough to carry with your digital camera.

I would definitely recommend getting this product! You can't find a better deal with the rebate offer!

For the price, size and quality its more novelty than serious printer, but its a good sort of novelty.

Pictures are small, but are on par with any other polaroid style camera. Good for scrapbooking, or checking images off LCD for digicams etc.

I bought mine in the hope it'd work with my P800 cell phones infrared, it didn't. Works fine with my nikon coolpix though.

The manual in mine says shoulderstrap included, however on the box it says it isn't,and it wasn't, not really a big deal though.

Haven't had a chance to see how easy it is to pickup film yet, but given its compatible with the joycam it should be reasonable easy.

The interface is ok, its a little terse but once you see where they were going its perfectly acceptable.

Prints come out fast, take a little while to appear.

Counting the rebate, and the included 10-photo film pack, you can't beat the price!
Keep in mind:
- Actual picture size is approx. 2.8 x 2.1 inches (tiny)
- Printing cost is around 90 cents per little photo. Typical of Polaroid.
- The colors on mine are a little red-shifted
Other than that, it is a great little photo printer. Perfect for kids.
Didn't experience any paper jams (yet).

This printer is exactly as advertised. This device will print 2x3 inch prints on polaroid film. The quality is typical polaroid instant prints that we've all seen. It's easy to load the film and the nice thing is that the film pack provides the power, so you don't need any external power. If your digital camera has a print option, this printer will read that and allow you to print just those pictures marked for printing--quick and easy. If not, it's still easy to use. You just need to know what picture number you want to print. It's easy to quickly scroll through all the prints on the memory card. Pressing and holding the scroll button on this printer quickly advances through the prints on the memory card. The price per print is a bit high...I wouldn't pay the original price for this, which was over[$]... Without the rebate, it's ok if you want to print pictures away from your computer.

This is a fun little printer. Prints small polaroid prints from digital compact flash card. This is great when you have kids- They enjoy seeing the image when it's still in the digital camera but enjoy seeing the actual print (especially as the image develops on the film) even more!

The prints are very small- actually quite convenient for wallet size. This is a convenient printer to bring along on a vacation when you really want a print before returning home.

The P-500IR is a stand-alone printer that outputs digital images onto P-500 Joycam instant film. It's "stand-alone" in that it doesn't have any direct connectivity to a computer, and it takes images from CompactFlash or SmartMedia cards (the latter requiring an included adapter). Since there is no preview screen on the unit (the thing runs on the embedded P500 film pack battery, so you only need to feed the thing film), you have to kinda guess which photo you're about to print. I've been taking the somewhat roundabout route of dumping the files from my digital camera onto the hard drive, tweaking and cropping with Photoshop, and then copying select files onto a CF card, which then is inserted into the P-500IR to be printed.

Output quality is pretty good, considering that it's instant film. The image size is pretty small, but it does create some unique "hard" artefacts of digital images. I think this printer would have been a questionable investment at its original price; however, with the discount, I suspect the folks at Polaroid are going to get their money back (and then some) on the film! The five stars are given specifically for the discounted price. This printer is a "must have" gadget at that price!

I was initially very excited about this printer which I purchased to take with me on a vacation to Europe. I could not have been more disappointed. I rationalized as a temporary glitch the fact that the printer jammed the very first time that I used it, but then realized that this printer jams about 50% of time, resulting in a fix (yanking out the cartridge & film paper) that wastes the expensive [...] paper. A couple of days ago I successfully printed 8 photos (a miracle), but they all had these burn markings on them (from the cartridge?). Tried to print 8 more photos & ended up yanking about $7 worth of film out of the machine to fix jams. Giving Polaroid the benefit of the doubt, we could say that I just got a "lemon", however 3 weeks ago when I first ordered this there were only about 2 or 3 used models available, as of this writing there are 6. If I can't return this thing, I certainly won't try to sell it to the unsuspecting public...

you get to take your high quality digital pictures, but still have the convienience of printing them immediately, no matter where you are. It's fairly small, and since the film contains the power supply, you don't need any additional batteries or power adapters to use it!