Polaroid P-500IR Digital Photo Printer

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!


What a gadget!   June 5, 2002
Tarkus
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

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!


A Big Disappointment   November 22, 2001
MotoGPTech (San Antonio, TX United States)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

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...