The OEM has produced a miniature printer for smartphones.
Sprocket is the name of the portable printer, which is small enough to fit into the palm of a hand and can easily fit into a purse or back pocket.The tiny printer can produce 2 x 3” sticky-backed photos from a smartphone or tablet in less than a minute, and works via Bluetooth connection.
The pictures are sharp with vivid colours, and it uses Zero Ink technology known as ZINK, which is smudge-proof and water-resistant, meaning the photos can be shared immediately.
The printer comes with the free HP Sprocket App for iOS and Android, so that consumers can customise and print their social media and phone photos, enhancing them with frames, text, stickers, filters and more.
HP Inc envisages that the device will be popular amongst the younger generation, who embrace gadgets and will find it fun to use.
The paper used to print the photos is HP ZINK, which “delivers bright, glossy photos without ink or toner cartridges” as the colour for printing is “embedded” in the special paper. The back of the paper has a peel-off facility to make the photos sticky-backed, which can then be used as stickers for bags, books and other accessories.
HP Inc sees Sprocket as a fun and easy way to “unlock all those digital pictures” stored on the smartphone or on social media sites. It is predicted that in 2016 “2.5 trillion photos will be shared or stored online” and that “90 percent of them will have originated on a smart phone”.