PRYNT brings back hopes of Instant Photography

A new project to turn your iPhone into a mobile printer has just got funded and it looks pretty weird. The Polaroid generation might like to differ but the product casing is nothing more than a Zink printer glued to an iPhone case.

Alternate Reality Mod

Ok, there is more. Each photo will record a 10 sec video before you snap the pix to accompany the image you snapped. This means the app will upload the video to the cloud so that each time you scan the image over the printed image, the 10 sec video will be downloaded for you the moment before capture. I am sure users will find a lot of kinky reasons to do this after watching 50 Shades of Grey, but there is no mention on how much cloud space you'd be given to store all your moments.

Zink printers don't need much pixels to render an image as the print themselves are pretty small. This means that most low resolution video image will print. Splendid. Now you can drop your pants for that skinny dipping selfie.

You can also technically grab a still image from video clips rendered in 1080p. So no problem there. The iPhone case will sell for roughly 80-90 bucks USD once released. No word yet on when it is available but it should be before Santa pops around this year but I would like to throw caution into the wind as the idea behind it is available right now if you plan to sandwich a LG PD-239 mobile Printer to you iPhone 6 Plus.

The PD-239 may not be too big for your iPhone 5c but if you happen to own anything bigger, it will work too. What the PD-239 doesn't have is the external shutter button, which you basically use to trigger the shot and have that printed out in an instant.

Zink Quality

For this you have to wait for my review on the LG PD-239 but I must say that the print quality is better than what you get from the Fujifim Instax Mini prints which are analogue in nature. Print cost, Zink is cheaper than Fujiinstax Mini.

The other interesting option is Zink offers you borderless prints as well as with funky designs.

The final question you should be asking yourself is do you want a print? I mean, in the era of social media sharing, you only need to tag your photos to your friends to see in FB or Instagram. So would you want to carry something like this along with you to print tiny little images to give away?

Well I think it would be great if you intended to give away photos of yourself and someone as a souvenir, as long as the other person isn't digitally connected.

There are still many places in the world where an Internet connection is a luxury. A Zink print would be something very unique for people who have no other way to remember a moment.

Aside from this, there is no other reason why you would want to carry this. Why would you? Please pray tell if you have another reason that isn't borderline kinky.

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Making a Seene for 3D Printing

Yes folks, the technology is almost here courtesy of Seene. No more fooling around with a scanner but with this app, you can already extract enough information to print a 3D model of anything you put your iPhone to.

3D scanning can be a difficult process. Depth information has to be measure precisely for a 3D model to be printed in the real world. This present some problems for those who don't have 3D scanners to do the trick, but not anymore. Seene, which produces this wonderful WebGL 3D parallax photo sharing service is at the forefront of 3D scanning, all from the courtesy of a iPhone app.

The app will be updated to support such scanning but the 3D printer is optional. You need to own a 3D printer first before you can even think of printing an object.

Now this isn't all that difficult since 3D printers have been coming down in price over the last two years and you can actually buy one for less than US$500 bucks for a kit or semi-built version.

Larger kit printers will cost more but that's entirely up to you to decide as the Seene app itself does not restrict the size of the object as long as it is photographed at medium distance within a plain background. These are indeed exciting times for the mobile photographer as the humble smartphone finds more and more uses with the attached camera.

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