Digital equivalent of Polaroid

[john y.k. lee]

I'm interested in head/shoulder portrait shots of people. I want the

digital equivalent of the old Polaroid pictures. The quality of the

camera/lens/printer are not as important as ease of use, reliability,

and trouble free, simple usage.

 

does anybody have any ideas?

 

Canon with their dye-sub 4x6 printer?

[bruce_rubenstein___nyc]

I would go with the Epson Picture Mate. You can connect many cameras directly to the printer with a USB cable and control the printing from the camera.

[Ed_Ingold]

Dye-sub printers are arguably the easiest and most trouble-free printers. The ink never "dries" out and the capacity (and cost) per print is fixed. The prints are highly resistant to handling, water and fingerprints. The downside is that you must purchase supplies from the manufacture only, and the size range is fixed or extremely limited.

 

There are many, economical 4x6 dye-sub printers on the market. I have an Hi-Touch 630P, which produces prints identical in appearance to minilab prints on Crystal C. The longevity is about the same, per Wilhelm Research data. A promising new printer is one of the Canon Selphy models. The material cost is about 1/3 that of the Hi-Touch, and the quality is reported to be very good. One Selphy model can be battery-operated!

 

Several of these printers can print directly from a CF or SD card. To do so, the image files must be JPEG, certainly not RAW. I feel more comfortable if I can do some adjustment in Photoshop (often minimal), and print through the USB port.

 

You would have to dumb-down the quality considerably to equal Polaroid pictures, maybe leave them in direct sunlight for a month or so ;-).

[tony_clark]

Rather then printing an image, why not shoot tethered to a computer? The image will appear

within seconds. I love to do this when shooting food or product, but when shooting people

you might want to disconnect after seeing the initial image.