• The New York Times, Monday, April 14, 2008 10:45 AM

Polaroid wants to conjure up those golden analog days of vast sales and instant gratification with a hand-size printer it's introducing this fall that connects wirelessly to phones and by cable to cameras, will cost about $150, and produces color snapshots in about 30 seconds. The images are the size of a credit card.

The new printers are so lightweight that a Polaroid executive demonstrating them recently had three tucked unnoticeably into various pockets of his trim jacket, whipping them out as if he were Harpo Marx. The prints, which are borderless, have a semigloss finish and an adhesive backing that can be peeled off if users want to stick them on a locker or a notebook cover, for instance.

The potential market for instant printing of photos is vast and largely untapped, says Steve Hoffenberg, an analyst at Lyra Research. But, he says, "potential markets can exist because they aren't tapped, but also because they aren't actually a market."

Read the whole story at The New York Times »