Polaroid Zink digital Z340E camera
 

Where was I when these went on the market in 2011? I missed the Circuit City sale flyer when it was $300.

It is a bizarre Polaroid branded Frankencam that is a cross between a 14meg digital camera and an internal thermal printer to sensitized paper delivering a 4" x 3" format. It all fits in an old Polaroid Spectra body form and spits out smallish printed photos in about a minute. And you can format change prints to look like an old white bordered Polaroid or save them and send to your printer.

I got this today from Ebay and am still learning it so photos will follow. What I learned so far;

The digital camera itself is pure 2011. Not so great. More later. But they did a great job joining it with an internal thermal printer that prints on proprietary paper from an outside vendor (Zink) in cyan/magenta/yellow/black on thermal crystal coated paper. It heats the crystals and they color up and print out. My first print was a bit dull but it aged a bit to better. The old white border style print is great but a bit small and crops your original photo to a center cut 2x3 cutting off the sides to give you a SX-70 style print with a fake chemical pod at the bottom. In the settings you can pick how it prints and add all sorts of filters and borders before you print. It does not print until you command it and saves all photos on a SDHC card for later. It even saves your changes as a separate file for later.

The camera itself is so-so, but the endless menu tree gives you a chance to change all sorts of settings. You can go to ISO 6400 but that is a noise machine. Some of the settings are duplicated in the print functions so you can add them later. It even has color settings to duplicate old SX-70 color properties or even earlier Polaroid BW roll film. Any menu change seems to be one time only and it reverts after to default settings. It has no optical VF, only a LCD popup screen which makes for a two-handed operation. But this Zink paper size seems too have been discontinued but still can be found so buyer beware.

Anyone else ever had one or am I on an island by myself?

Check out Techmoan's channel on youtube, I *think* he's done a video on this one, not sure. He's done a couple such cameras.

Last I was at Wally World (a month ago?) they had Zink cameras, printers, and paper. Never tried it though. I have a Lomo Automat Glass that shoots on the mini Fuji Instax and a Polaroid 110A/B I modified to shoot on Instax wide. The Polaroid Originals/Impossible is expensive and bad, which is a shame as I rather like shooting with my SX-70 Sonar.......

I think I’ll keep my Hasselblad...