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Tomy Xiao TIP-521 Is Polaroid Wannabe Without All the Charm
Posted by Jesus Diaz at 6:20 AM on November 7, 2008
The Tomy Xiao TIP-521 digital camera uses its built-in Zink printer to print borderless 2 x 3-inch full-colour photographs in less than 60 seconds. In other words, more or less the same as a 30-year-old Polaroid instant camera, but without the completely irresistible charm of seeing a blurry image with crappy colour appear right in front of your very own eyes. You know, like magic!
Nokia filed a new patent last week trying to solve one of the problems of our digital lives: identifying what and who is in our digital photos. It's the digital equivalent of scribbling on the white bit at the bottom of a Polaroid pic (you know the kind of text: "Steve looking silly in Hawaii," "Me in hospital, April '08") and if you add in geotagging, it'd be a convenient way of keeping track. The patent details a system a little similar to Cover Flow, but when photos are flipped over to reveal a blank rear face, a user will have the option to annotate snaps with text entered on the keypad, and the text is permanently incorporated into the image file. If it makes it to reality, I hope they include that real "scribbling" option through touchscreen tech: I kinda miss writing on the back of my photos. [
Can it get any more adorably indie than a short film portrayed on 987 Polaroids that display flipbook-style on a giant drum inside a machine called the "Process Enacted Mutoscope"? I'm thinking no. The rig is pretty cool, though--letting you control the speed of playback frame-by-frame, as you can see in the video that follows. The obvious genre for films using the ol' Mutoscope, though, should be "Victorian Softcore."
The Gadget: The Polaroid PoGo, an inkless printer that prints 2" x 3" sticker pictures from digital cameras via USB and mobile phones over Bluetooth.
The Polaroid instant digital picture frame is just that, a digital screen in the shape and size of an old Polaroid instant photo (
Polaroid is closing its last remaining film plants in Mass. so the oh so fun instant Polaroids will soon become a thing of the past. Well it's already a thing of the past, but this time it's serious since no more instant film will be produced. 
Last quarter was an all-out TV-maker battle, and you my friends were the territory. DisplaySearch's results for Q4 '07 declared the victor in the US LCD category to be Sony for the very first time. Panasonic handily crushed all comers in the smaller US plasma race, and Samsung, with strong #2 finishes in both, ended up remaining the #1 overall TV brand in the country. LG also held its own. But while these Big Four gained ground—often by keeping profit margins slim and exploring cheaper manufacturing—other well-regarded brands like Sharp, Philips and Hitachi fell back. The strongest competition in LCD came from Vizio and Polaroid, but many other brands clashed like barbarians at the gate. DisplaySearch's charts with market share number are just after the jump, but first answer this simple question:
Zink's zero-ink technology was developed in polaroid labs, so its nice seeing the tech making it back to its home marquee. 
Polaroid, once the fun company that marched to its own weird drum beat, is now officially in lockstep behind every other electronics maker. The "innovative" new Polaroid t730 digicam boasts the following:
• Bright 2.5" color LCD screen lets you "see it before you shoot"
• It can tag audio to any picture
• It can take AVI video clips
• 3x optical/4x digital zoom lets you "get close to your subject"
• Other features include panoramic mode, 20 different scene modes, slide show options, a host of automatic settings (focus, exposure, etc.), and 32MB of built-in storage
In other words, it can do what basically every other 7-megapixel 3x optical-zoom compact camera on the market can do. Except sell at Target for $180. Okay, so maybe it's the price that's innovative.
