A Pocket-Sized Printer for Your Smartphone

In the year that we live in, we’re all replacing our portable cameras with smartphones and our photos are captured and shared online in seconds. You wake up in the morning and you have to go back to your phone to see photos of you and your friends. You need to search your image library to see a family photo and when you look around the room it’s completely void of all those memories, they’re all locked into your phone… Sad right?

HP have a neat little product that may change that a little. Called the Sprocket, this very small printer will take those photos from the BBQ and create a physical momento. The HP Sprocket contains a battery so it doesn’t need to be plugged into power to work, and also contains bluetooth. With bluetooth you’ll achieve complete wireless freedom by sending the image from your phone to your printer without a wire in sight.

The companion app for iOS and Android allows you to connect to the images on the device or even images from your Facebook and Instagram. At the touch of a button you can add filters, borders and other additions before sending it to the printer.

From a paper perspective, the HP Sprocket uses eInk paper which means that the printer itself has no ink cartridges, no toner, nothing, just insert the HP eInk paper and the image will reproduce right in front of your eyes. The quality is actually rather impressive too! The size of the print may be it’s only obvious and limiting factor being around the size of a business card however if you print a few images you’ll quickly have a lovely collage of an event or moment in time, and that’s really the point here.

For $199 the HP Sprocket is one of the nicest ways to bring back what was once an important element in our lives. No longer do we need to host gatherings and wait to see photos online, you can easily print photos on the spot for people to take home and remember the night forever. It’s small enough to fit in your pocket and simple enough that the oldies will take over printing duties before you know it. Maybe next time you wake up after that night out you’ll have a few photos sitting on your bedside table, that’s the reminder we prefer in 2017.

The HP Sprocket was also discussed on Talking Lifestyle and you can hear us talk about it here