HP Sprocket 2-in-1 Photo Printer and Camera Review: Fun for Snapshots, Bad…

The HP Sprocket 2-in-1 is a portable photo printer with a camera built in, which is sure to be fun when snapping photos with friends, but you’ll get better pictures from competing photo printers.

Tom’s Guide Verdict

The HP Sprocket 2-in-1 is a portable photo printer with a camera built in, which is sure to be fun when snapping photos with friends, but you’ll get better pictures from competing photo printers.

Pros

• Photo printer and camera in one
• Inkless printing is hassle-free
• Rechargeable battery

Cons

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Decades ago, the Polaroid Instant camera was an iconic piece of tech that was as popular for its day as the latest iPhone is now. It pioneered the use of self-developing film, and it was a hit for decades. HP has introduced a new portable photo printer, the Sprocket 2-in-1 (159.99), and it comes with a camera built right in. Is this the new instant camera? Maybe, but it could stand to improve its print quality.

Design

The Sprocket 2-in-1 is small, made to slip into a or purse to take with you on the go and pull out on the spur of the moment. The 2-in-1 camera/printer‘s design is sleek and smooth, with a glossy white plastic exterior and copper-hued accents.

Along one edge is the exit slot for printed photos, which also has an LED-lit strip that glows white when the printer is on. On the opposite edge of the Sprocket you’ll find a slider switch to power the device on, a micro USB port for charging the internal battery and an anchor for a lanyard loop. HP includes a wrist strap for the Sprocket so that you can use it as a camera without risk of dropping it.

On the bottom of the camera/printer is a tripod mount and a microSD card slot for saving digital copies of the photos you snap with the Sprocket. Along the top edge of the device are a shutter button, a timer button that gives you 10 seconds to join a group photo, and a flip-up viewfinder.

The viewfinder is interesting for two reasons; first, it has a functional purpose, switching the device between stand-alone photo printing and camera use. It also has a plastic window over the viewfinder that is slightly mirrored, giving you a tiny reflection for framing selfies. On the front face of the Sprocket is the lens, along with a tiny LED flash. On the back is a hatch used to load the printer’s 2 x 3-inch Zink Paper.

App

The Sprocket 2-in-1 uses HP’s Sprocket app (available for Android and iOS) to manage and print photos. Using the app you can print photos from your smartphone, just as you would with the camera-less version of the HP Sprocket. Made for simplicity and speedy printing, HP touts the app’s “two tap” interaction, where printing a photo is as simple as tapping the selected image from your photos and tapping the print icon.

Connecting to the printer is simple, with a straightforward Bluetooth connection instead of Wi-Fi Direct or a cable. The app not only pulls from the photos saved to your camera roll, but also can print apps from Instagram, or Google.

HP Sprocket MINI PRINTS!

You can also crop and edit photos in the app, or embellish pictures with SnapChat-style filters and stickers. The selection of stickers and other embellishments is updated regularly, providing seasonal options alongside popular items. When I tested the app and printer at the end of October, the app had all sorts of Halloween- and fall-themed borders, stickers and emojis. As far as the app’s core functionality is concerned, Sprocket is a solid win.

But perhaps the most interesting thing is the app’s “embedded memories” feature. Once a photo has been printed, you can scan it with your smartphone’s camera, much like you would a QR code. In the Sprocket app, you will then be able to pull up your other photos and videos from the same location and time, see a Google Street view photosphere of the photo location, and even pull up relevant Wikipedia articles, a handy tool for providing context to pictures taken at tourist hotspots or other popular places.

You can also view video clips from a single printed frame of the video, with an AR layer within the app that plays back the video within the border of the printed photo. When I tested it with a clip of my son taking some of his first steps, it let me view the video like a living photo. But the tool itself was finicky, only working properly when the photo was perfectly still and in sharp FOCUS, which the camera on my Samsung Galaxy S6 didn’t always want to do.

In a conversation with David Parry, senior innovations manager for HP, he said that one of the goals of the Sprocket app was “reinventing the way you experience memory.” While the assorted elements of photo grouping, automatic location info and AR video options all show promise of one day doing that, it still feels like a gimmick, and a clunky one at that.

Performance

Unfortunately, the most important thing any photo printer does – printing photos – is the one area where the Sprocket 2-in-1 is pretty mediocre. Some issues are to be expected, like the fact that photos (measuring 2 x 3 inches) are really small, with very low resolution (313 x 400 dpi). Obviously, you’ll have some issues with lost detail when printing higher-resolution pics. If you’re looking to print photos for scrapbooking or even fine-art quality printing, look elsewhere. Like the old Polaroid photos of decades past, these pictures are prized for their immediacy.

And they do print quickly. On average, printing photos from my phone took 47.7 seconds per photo, which includes both the actual printing (33 seconds, on average) and a preprinting process that adds data to the image and transmits the picture to the printer (14 seconds, on average). Using the printer’s built-in camera was faster, as it could skip the encoding and transmitting process and jump straight to printing. These instant camera prints averaged 35 seconds each.

The bigger problem is print quality. Color was the first problem area. Colors that should have been a solid shade, or that should have smoothly transitioned from one shade to another, instead had a mottled look. Flesh tones never looked right, frequently coming out unnaturally pink, and darker complexions coming out flat and lifeless. Color consistency also varied from one photo to the next. When I printed the same photo twice — a cheerful field of sunflowers — the bright yellows of one photo were more orange in the next.

The other issue is that the printer introduces a number of errors into each print. Some colors would have a distinctive pattern of banding, adding discolored stripes to a picture of a red rose, or making a blank wall appear almost striped. Other times, foreground objects would appear correct, but backgrounds were a strange mosaic-like grid of low-resolution coloring. Neither the color issue nor the print errors can be attributed to the Zink printing process, since neither problem showed up when using the very similar Polaroid Zip.

Finally, the built-in 5-megapixel camera is OK at best. Pictures taken with the Sprocket camera were best under very controlled circumstances, with a well-lit subject and a steady hand. Test photos taken under such circumstances and compared against smartphone photos in those exact same circumstances appeared very similar in print.

Less formal snapshots, on the other hand, varied hugely in quality. Photos were poorly framed, even when using the viewfinder, and the flash left photos poorly lit. In these circumstances, the camera on my Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone was always better.

Printing Costs

The HP Sprocket uses ZINK inkless photo paper. The ZINK photo paper is covered with a layer of color-changing dye crystals, which are heated to produce the final image. The same process is used by competitors, such as the Polaroid Zip photo printer, which also uses ZINK paper. The benefit of this approach is twofold; first, there’s no need to wait for a photo to develop, which you would get with instant film, such as that used in the Fujifilm Instax Share SP-3. Second, there are no inks involved, so there’s no worry of smudging a fresh print or having a disastrous ink spill if you leave the photo printer in a backpack or suitcase for a long trip.

HP sells refills of the 2×3-inch ZINK paper for about 50 cents per photo. Since only 10 papers can be loaded into the printer, they come in 10-sheet packets, bundled in either a 20-sheet package (9.99) or a 50-pack (24.99). We wish that buying a larger package improved the per-photo price, but there’s no discount for buying in bulk. (In fact, if you bought 100 sheets in 20-packs rather than 50-packs, you would save 3 cents.)

All of HP’s ZINK photo paper can also be used as stickers. Peel off the backing layer from a photo and a sticky back lets you slap it on your bathroom mirror or your binder for school. If you don’t want a sticker, just leave the backing paper in place. It’s difficult enough to remove that you shouldn’t ever have an issue with photos unwantedly turning into stickers after being kept in an envelope or a shoebox.

Battery Life

The Sprocket 2-in-1 comes with a built-in lithium polymer 500mAh battery. There’s no user-accessible battery compartment, so you’ll be able to use the printer until the rechargeable battery finally gives up the ghost. Charging is simple thanks to an included USB to micro USB cable, but you can also get away with using a micro USB phone charger in a pinch.

The Sprocket should give you enough battery life to print 40 photos, though that may vary slightly when using the built-in camera. By comparison, the Polaroid Zip lasts for only 25 prints, while the Fujifilm Instax SP-3’s battery is good for 160 photos.

Bottom Line

The HP Sprocket 2-in-1 is an amusing toy, giving you the chance to print photos on the spot, and even snap a few new ones as you go. Like most mobile snapshot printers, it doesn’t offer the greatest print quality, but it’s selling instant gratification with its 2 x 3-inch photos, not pristine printing. In the end, we saw slightly better print quality from the Polaroid Zip, despite the two products being so similar.

The big point of divergence from the Polaroid, however, is the introduction of a built-in camera, and that does score some points with us. When fun is the name of the game, the HP Sprocket 2-in-1 will be the life of the party, letting you snap photos as well as print them. That’s a fun feature, but in the end, you’ll get better photos using your phone and the Polaroid than you’ll get with the Sprocket’s camera.

Credit: Brian Westover/Tom’s Guide

Going by the selfie trend, HP launched Sprocket for “millennials”. It is a printer measuring smaller than your average 5-inch smartphone and it can print photos wirelessly from your phone. Let’s take a look at how it works, the quality this tiny printer can deliver and at what cost.

By Rahul Sethi: When it comes to printers, not many companies make them. There are a few portable printers available in the market, like the Canon CP1000 Selphy that is the size of a bread loaf and can give you 4×6 photo album prints, or the Epson workforce WF-100 that’s almost the size of a laptop but can print regular A4 pages in colour.

None of them can fit in your though, something that the HP Sprocket can do. Going by the selfie trend, HP launched Sprocket for “millennials”. It is a printer measuring smaller than your average 5-inch smartphone and it can print photos wirelessly from your phone. So, photos are obviously small, the size of an ID card and will fit in your wallet. Let’s take a look at how it works, the quality this tiny printer can deliver and at what cost.

Setting up Sprocket

It is easy to setup the Sprocket, at least compared to a conventional printer. It comes with a built-in rechargeable battery to power it, there are no cartridges to be installed, no ink to be filled, no calibration to be done. The ink is already embedded on small sheets that are to be used on the printer. HP Sprocket ships with a pack of 10 Zink sheets. Zink literally means Zero Ink, a paper that doesn’t require ink to be printed on. They come in 2×3 inch size and you will also find them on Polaroid cameras.

The top of the printer can be slid open to put Zink sheets, all 10 at once. There is actually a mini tray inside to keep the Zink sheets.

The printer is controlled by an app that can be downloaded free from the Apple and Android app stores. After you install the app on a phone, the printer connects to the smartphone via Bluetooth and synchornises to provide battery and print status. There is also an option to shuts down the printer automatically to save battery.

There is no NFC on board so you can’t touch and connect the printer. over, photos cannot be printer directly from your phone gallery. All the photos appear on your device appear on the app (the app requires permission to gallery and camera). There is also an option to sync your. Instagram and Google accounts to access photos directly on to the app. But there is also no option to cancel once you have given the print command. By the time you cancel it from the print queue menu, the printer has already started printing. The Sprocket quality is surely better than affordable instant cameras of this price range but it is nowhere near to what a conventional printer can deliver

The HP Sprocket app also has some nifty photo editing tools that allow you to add frames, filters, text, scribble or pre-loaded stickers or graphics onto the photo. The orientation is automatically adjusted to utilise the full size of the print and you can manually rotate the photo any way with pinch-zoom-rotate two-finger gestures.

Print quality

Since Sprocket connects directly to your smartphone, you get much better photos than what you expect from affordable instant cameras. But then again, photo quality is very subjective and very different from what you see on your smartphone screen, so let me break this down further. Instant cameras have their own optics in place, alongside the printing mechanism. Comparing it with classic analog Polaroids, the quality of recently launched instant camera is not that good. Priced under Rs 10,000, instant cameras like Instax deliver much inferior quality compared to regular Polaroids. On the other side, take out the printer and give it capabilities to wirelessly talk to Smart device makes for much better setup, however un-nostalgic that might be. Phone cameras can capture good photos, especially low light shots, for they have software and a dedicated ISP on-board to make good photos before you print them. On instant cameras there’s minimal hardware to capture the scene.

Having said that, the Sprocket does compress photos or in other words lower the quality. The images that come out of the portable printer may appear dull compared to the photos you see on the phone. Much of the detail is lost, and the colours lose their sheen. This may not matter to you if you travel months at an end and have a habit of maintaining a daily diary. Getting a photo in a mid of desert or mountain days away from civilization for your travelogue will be terrific. But for those who have access.- doesn’t matter sooner or later.- to much better printers, you can get far better photos at a much lower cost. Not to mention the Sprocket prints are small. They are smaller than Instax, and way smaller than the classic square Polaroid prints.

Cost per page

A pack of 20 Zink sheets sell on Amazon at Rs 599. Since the printing doesn’t require any ink, cost of paper is the only cost involved. So per photo you would be paying around 30 rupees. This doesn’t take into account the cost of Sprocket, which would make the print more expensive.

If you were to order the photos from a photo lab, they will turn out to be easier on your A 4×6 album print will not only be bigger in size, but also have much better quality. But far from instant delivery, that may require several days to get you the print. Also Read: HP Sprocket is a wireless.sized photo printer for Rs 8,999 The other option is that in place of HP Sprocket (at the same price) you can print up to A4-size photos as instantly as the sprocket if you are near the printer or as soon as you get home. They may cost as much as the Zink sheet but they will be bigger and have much better quality.

The comparison isn’t a fair one, for the Sprocket can print in your car while you are driving. Conventional printers can’t do that. It only points to the need for neatly laying down your requirements of printing on the go and weighing it alongside the proposition of printing otherwise. But yet, we feel it is a comparison that needs to be made.

Should you buy?

The HP Sprocket addresses a very specific set of printing needs. And it is fun. Precisely put, it is an instant portable personal printer. But I was really hard-pressed to think who will want it, especially in a country where you find photo-wallas at pretty much every tourist site. If you love to have instant photos, Sprocket, although slightly expensive at Rs 8,999, is a device made for you. But then chances are that probably you don’t average quality instant photos. The Sprocket quality is surely better than affordable instant cameras of this price range but it is nowhere near to what a conventional printer can deliver.

HP Sprocket review6.5/10

• Bad stuff
• Expensive
• Limited use
• Prints too small

HP Sprocket Studio photo printer review

The Sprocket Studio is a fun way to get good quality photo prints at home, with a suite of editing features adding a unique touch to your memories. The companion app is also intuitive and easy to use, but a few flaws mar the experience, and the ongoing costs can prove to be too much.

Pros

• Large, good quality photo prints
• Incredibly easy to use
• Various photo editing options

Cons

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One-minute review

The HP Sprocket Studio is a fresh take on the company’s portable photo printer line, but instead of wallet-sized 2 x 3-inch prints, this spits out glossy 4 x 6-inch photos. That means you can get a frame-worthy photo minutes after taking the shot on your mobile phone.

The Sprocket Studio uses a method known as ‘dye sublimation’ to transfer layers of color onto a medium. It’s a slower process than the technology used in standard inkjet printers, but the results are of a better quality to what you’d get from a regular printer.

To get started, you will need to download the HP Sprocket companion app (available for both iOS and Android) to your smartphone, and it comes with a host of editing features to make your prints pop. During our testing, we found these editing features quite useful, although some may find them to be a little kitschy.

Unlike the smaller Sprocket printers, the Studio needs to be plugged into a power source when in use. Add its larger size into the equation, and it’s not as immediately portable as HP’s other instant printers – although an optional Power Bank (available in select regions) will let you take it on the road (although availability of the Power Bank was poor at the time of writing this review.)

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Price and availability

The HP Sprocket Studio is available now for 149.99 / AU219 (around £115). Inside the box you’ll also get an ink cartridge and 10 sheets of photo paper to get you started. Additional cartridges and printing sheets are sold together for 34.99 / £35.99 / AU59, setting you up with an extra 80 sheets and two ink cartridges. That shakes out to be about 44c / 45p / 74c per print.

As with all printers, the ongoing costs could certainly start to add up, and in comparison to some other photo printers, the Sprocket Studio doesn’t stack up quite as well. For example, the Canon Selphy CP1300 retails for 109.99 / £119.99 / AU179. Canon’s extra ink and paper comes at a cost of 35.99 / £35.99 / AU44.95, and includes 108 printing sheets, equaling a lower cost per print.

Design

The Sprocket Studio is much bigger than the other printers from the Sprocket series. Measuring in at 169 x 273 x 68mm, it’s got a larger footprint than the Sprocket Select, which comes in at a tiny 142 x 89 x 18mm.

The printer comes in a light grey that HP calls ‘snow’, and it’s dotted with bits of dark green that remind you of a speckled egg, giving it a touch of character. It otherwise looks very clean and polished.

There’s a single power button on the left-hand side of the Sprocket Studio. On the rear of the printer is a proprietary socket for the power cable, which is about the same size as a standard laptop charger, adding extra bulk to an already larger-than-usual Sprocket.

A glowing strip of light on the front indicates when the printer is on (you can select your preferred color during setup) and it’ll turn red if you run into any problems, such as running out of paper or ink.

The only other prominent feature is the paper tray, which sticks out from the printer body, giving the Sprocket Studio an odd, asymmetric shape, though admittedly it began to grow on us after a few uses.

This simple physical design makes the Sprocket Studio incredibly easy to use, and it’s a simplicity that’s carried on into the app and when printing photos.

App control

HP’s Sprocket Studio works via a Bluetooth connection to your phone, with the Sprocket app controlling all the printing. The app is very intuitive and easy to use, taking you through the setup process one step at a time – including how to insert the ink cartridge.

When connected, the app shows you every picture on your phone, including images from Instagram, and Google Photos if you connect to them through the HP Sprocket app. You can also choose to group these according to the source folder of your images. If your phone supports RAW images, the app will display those as well.

As mentioned earlier, there are a suite of editing tools that allow you to tweak your image before you hit the proverbial ‘print’ button. You can adjust exposure to increase brightness, tweak color, add a preset filter or text, giving you plenty of creative license.

If you want to customize a little further, you can add borders, stickers, and even your own drawings. Adding your own personally-designed stickers is a unique idea, but it doesn’t always execute so well in practice.

We found that the app often struggles to identify a drawing, particularly if the lines are thin. In fact, the app was also unable to pick up a drawing done with a thicker marker. We found it worked best with solid block colors. It would have been an excellent feature if it worked well, but there’s a library of pre-set stickers to choose from to save you the trouble of drawing you own.

Performance

To cut a long story short, the Sprocket Studio produces good quality photo prints. They aren’t perfect, but detail is well preserved and the colors are accurate. We say it’s not perfect because we noticed a faint, vertical line running down the right edge of our test prints.

On others, it seemed the dye had run a little horizontally, most likely from catching on a fleck of dust during printing – definitely worth checking that your photo paper is free from small particles of dust before you begin the printing process. That said, these are minor flaws that you’ll likely only notice with a critical eye.

Where the smaller Sprocket uses zero-ink (Zink) – a printing technology that does away with ink and toners, instead using color embedded in the Zink paper – the Studio prints using dye sublimation.

This is a relatively slow process as the paper runs back and forth through the machine for each color to be added layer by layer – first yellow, then magenta, cyan and a clear top coat. HP says that the print time is as fast as 61 seconds per print, but our tests showed it was slower, coming in at around 80-90 seconds from start to finish.

That doesn’t seem too bad if you’re just printing a few snaps at a time, but if you’re creating an album or collage, that time frame could stretch on a little long.

The supplied photo paper comes with a perforated side on each short edge. The image is printed between the two, so you can pick up the final result immediately after printing without having to worry about smudged ink. These blank edges can then be torn off, leaving you with a full 4 x 6 print with neat sides.

However, we found that this didn’t work perfectly. In all eight of our test prints, the Sprocket began printing about 5mm over the perforations (although ending right on cue). This can prove to be an issue if important elements of your photo are at the edges of your composition.

Verdict

Before the Studio came along, HP’s Sprocket family was only able to print smaller wallet-sized photos. With the Studio, you’re able to print larger, better quality snaps that can fit photo frames.

It’s a breeze to use, and the photo editing features available in the app can add a personal touch to your smartphone camera roll. That said, creating custom stickers doesn’t work as well as we would have hoped, and the need for a slightly bulky power supply means this Sprocket isn’t really a “go-anywhere device” like HP’s other instant printers. Still, it’s a fun way to get good quality photo prints at home.

Whether you consider it affordable is another matter altogether. As with any printer, there are ongoing costs you will need to take into consideration – the cost of additional ink and paper to be precise. If the price of the printer itself (which does just one job – print 4×6 photos) was a little lower, it would have been easier to recommend the Sprocket Studio.

HP Sprocket Studio Review

Jeremy Laukkonen is automotive and tech writer for numerous major trade publications. When not researching and testing computers, game consoles or smartphones, he stays up-to-date on the myriad complex systems that power battery electric vehicles.

HP Sprocket Studio

The HP Sprocket is a remarkably compact photo printer that can whip up a high-quality 4×6 print in about a minute either at home or on the go.

HP Sprocket Studio

The HP Sprocket Studio is a portable photo printer that’s capable of delivering professional-quality prints both at home and on the go. This printer is significantly larger than the other devices in the Sprocket line, and it definitely isn’t.sized, but the detachable bed and included battery make it fairly easy to pack up and take with you.

I recently enlisted the help of friends and family, with the promise of some free 5×7 prints, to put an HP Sprocket Studio to the test both around the office and some on-demand printing while out and about. Over the course of about a week with this device, I tested things like color reproduction, speed, the durability of prints, and the ability of the Sprocket Studio to reproduce a wide variety of still and action shots.

Design: Too big for your. but portable enough

The selling point of the Sprocket line has always been the ability to slip a battery-poweredprinter in your. and the Sprocket Studio is just a little too big for that. Instead of a rectangular puck form factor like the other Sprocket printers, it houses the printing mechanism in the familiar puck and also includes a rectangular bed that holds the printer paper.

Best Portable Photo Printer 2023 [don’t buy one before watching this]

The main body of the unit I tested was a matte gray color, with the top of the puck section featuring an attractive speckled look. Other than that the overall design is very minimalist, with a single power button, a customizable LED indicator, a power input, and not a whole lot else.

While the Sprocket Studio isn’t quite as portable as the other printers in the line, it’s still small enough to pack up and take with you. The included battery adds a bit of extra bulk and weight, but that’s the tradeoff for the ability to print anywhere and anytime you want.

If you’re planning on leaving this one on your desk, there is one peculiarity to the design that you need to know about. Unlike most printers, this one requires a significant amount of clearance to the rear in order to function. Due to the way that it pulls each print through the print head, back and forth, for multiple passes, you need about five inches of clearance behind the device to keep your prints from running into anything.

Setup Process: Remarkably fast and easy

The HP Sprocket Studio is one of the simplest printer setups I’ve ever run into. It is important to note that this printer only works over Bluetooth, and you have to print from a mobile device. You can’t connect it to your network, and there’s no way to connect it directly to a computer. With that in mind, the setup process goes most smoothly if you start downloading the Sprocket app to your phone before unboxing the printer.

The printer itself comes shrink-wrapped, so you have to peel it out of its protective coating and then drop in the printer cartridge to get started. Other than that, all you have to do is plug the unit in and set the photo paper in the paper tray.

Once you have the app installed and the printer is loaded and turned on, it’s a simple matter of pairing the printer and your phone via Bluetooth. After that, you print directly from the phone. As long as you’re about 30 feet or so from the printer, you can initiate new prints.

Printing Quality: Just as good as your local drug store photo department

The Sprocket Studio only comes with enough ink and paper for 10 prints, but I plugged in an additional cartridge and stack of paper so I could print a wider variety of shots in a wider variety of circumstances. I printed off some of my favorite snaps I’ve taken with my Pixel 3 after setting the printer up at home, then I tossed it in my messenger bag and carried it around for a week, allowing friends and family to use the “my friend’s sprocket” option in the app to print their own favorite shots.

The Sprocket Studio does seem to have a bit of trouble printing detail in especially dark shots, but that’s really the only issue I noticed. It handled still shots, action shots, both real and fake bokeh effects, and my niece and nephew got a kick out of the option to add stickers and other effects.

Overall, I didn’t notice any difference in the quality of these prints compared to what I’d expect to get from the local drug store or Walmart. I also like the color reproduction better than similar printers that use Zink technology. Tearing the ends off the photos after printing does leave a barely noticeable rough edge, but the actual picture quality is great.

Print Speed: About a minute per print

Actual print speed varies depending on what you’re printing, but this will never be the fastest printer around. It takes four passes for each print to lay down cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and in my experience, most photos took about a minute to finish. Photo printers that handle everything in one pass can get things done more quickly, but a minute per print is pretty good from such a portable device.

Connectivity: Limited to Bluetooth

As I mentioned briefly before, the HP Sprocket Studio is limited to Bluetooth in terms of connectivity. You can’t connect to a computer via your home network or a USB cable, and there is no option to plug in an SD card or USB stick. Some of the Sprocket Studio’s competitors do offer those features, so the lack of connectivity is something to keep in mind if you want to print from anything other than your phone.

Software: Easy HP phone app

You can’t use the HP Sprocket Studio without installing the Sprocket app. The good news is the app downloads and installs quickly, and it’s exceptionally easy to use. I was able to set it up and start printing within a minute or so, and your friends and family can even download it and select the “my friend’s sprocket” setting if you want to let them print directly from their own devices instead of emailing you shots to print.

The app is fairly bare-bones. You have the option to choose a photo from your device or to grab one from a connected account, like or Instagram, and then the app gives you some basic tools to adjust the brightness, contrast, color levels, and other settings. It isn’t exactly Photoshop, but it is there if you need to tweak a snap before printing it.

In addition to basic image adjustments, the app also allows you to insert a border, text, stickers, and various effects.

Price: You’re paying for portability

The HP Sprocket Studio has an MSRP of 150. While it’s typically available for a bit less than that, a number of competitors offer their own 4×6 photo printers for less. The difference is that while those units are often just as small as the Sprocket Studio, they aren’t actually portable.

With the Sprocket Studio’s battery, which definitely adds a bit of additional cost to the initial investment, this printer is truly portable and allows you to print wherever you want.

Ongoing costs of use are more or less in line with most of the competition. A pack of 80 sheets of photo paper and two ink cartridges, enough for 80 prints, costs about 35 for a per-print cost of about 0.44.

HP Sprocket Studio vs. Canon Selphy

The Canon Selphy has an MSRP of 1110 (view on Amazon) for just the printer, or 180 for the printer and a battery pack. That makes the base unit cheaper than the HP Sprocket Studio, but you don’t get true portability unless you pay for a significant upgrade.

The Selphy does provide a great deal of versatility that the HP Sprocket Studio lacks. In addition to 4×6 prints, the Selphy can also print in a number of other formats, all the way down to 2.1 x 2.1-inch squares. It also features a built-in LCD display, Wi-Fi connectivity, Airprint compatibility, and the option to print from both SD cards and USB memory sticks.

I like the Sprocket Studio for the lower price, compared to the battery pack version of the Selphy, and for the slightly better portability. Packing this little printer along and printing photos for friends and family on the go was a remarkable amount of fun. However, the Selphy is the better option if you plan on leaving the printer on your desk.

Beautiful photos in under a minute wherever you are.

The HP Sprocket Studio is a fairly limited device, in that you can only print 4×6 inch photos. However, it does that one job exceedingly well, in a remarkably portable package, and for an affordable per-print price. If you’re in the market for a photo printer to specifically print 4×6 inch photos, then the HP Sprocket Studio is a great option. You’ll want to look elsewhere if you need to print a more versatile set of sizes, but the HP Sprocket Studio is definitely my choice for a highly portable 4×6 inch photo printer.

HP Sprocket – Portable Photo Printer

Do you have a habit of inviting friends and showing them photos on your notebook or computer? Of course, not. In the past few years, smartphones completely replaced the digital cameras and physical photos have lost their significance in favor of digital. There are also a lot of various photo sharing apps that help you easily exchange photos with your family or friends. But, if you belong to older generations, there is nothing like holding the real, physical photo in your hands. You can find a lot of cameras on the market to make instant photos but HP Company gave us an interesting toy called HP Sprocket photo printer for that purpose. It’s a printer with which you can print your selfies and other pictures from your mobile phone, in a really fun way. As it’s one of the most entertaining gadgets, we put it on the shortlist of the best gadget in 2016. Check out here how this gadget improved over the years.

Sprocket is HP’s answer to the competition of portable instant printers that prints photos from your mobile devices, tablets, laptops, etc. Although, it doesn’t give as much quality prints as other similar products, but using its iOS/Android applications, you can easily create a silly and wacky photos with the Sprocket printer. It can take a photo from the gallery of your phone, Instagram, Flickr or. and because it also has the access to your camera, you can print photos whatever you want.

One of the greatest advantages of Sprocket printer is its size. With dimensions 4.53 x 2.95 x 0.87 inches, you can carry this small printer in your (not much larger than most smartphones). It’s also lightweight with only 170 grams. We’ve tested the black-sliver model but if you want more fashionable model, you should buy white-rose gold version.

HP Sprocket Portable Photo Printer, X7N07A, Print Social Media Photos on 2×3 Sticky-Backed Paper. White

amazon.com

• Live it. Love it. Print it: Printing off social media photos has never been easier from your smartphone. Connect your social media accounts to the free-to-download HP Sprocket App and instantly turn those photos into colorful prints
• A Social on-the-go portable printer: Sprocket uses seamless Bluetooth connectivity, so you can set it up at parties and events, and everyone can print their favorite moments from their smartphones or tablets

HP Sprocket Portable Photo Printer, print social media photos on 2×3 sticky-backed paper. black (X7N08A)

amazon.com

• Live it. Love it. Print it: Printing off social media photos has never been easier from your smartphone. Connect your social media accounts to the free-to-download HP Sprocket App and instantly turn those photos into colorful prints.
• A Social on-the-go portable printer: Sprocket uses seamless Bluetooth connectivity, so you can set it up at parties and events, and everyone can print their favorite moments from their smartphones or tablets.

The principle of work is based on a special photo paper named as ZINK Zero Ink. It’s a composite material consisting of a substrate with the individual layers of crystals in blue, yellow and red colors, and also a protective polymer coating. In the basic state, the crystals are amorphous, so the paper retains the white color. The printing process is about to heating certain parts to necessary temperature for the activation of a particular color. The result is a bright and colorful picture with a sticky surface on the back. Paints in the final photo are water resistible and very stable.

The Sprocket printer includes 10 pieces of the printing paper. The replacement pack of 20 pieces costs 10 dollars. Each paper is a sticker. The Sprocket printer is rechargeable through a Micro USB and via Bluetooth you can establish the connection to your phone.

We’re really amazed by the Sprocket printer, mainly because it’s very easy to use. We didn’t find the instruction manual on the package and that explains everything.

First, you need to charge your Sprocket printer (the light turns from red to green, and it’s possible to use it while charging). The next thing you need to do is to remove the lid of the printer, insert the photo paper the way it says to and that’s all. Then, download “HP Sprocket” application and turn on the Sprocket printer. Enable Bluetooth on your phone, find HP Sprocket and connect to it. Then, open the app on your phone and from there you can edit you can edit your photos, use all available tools and finally choose the photos for printing. The photo size is 2×3 inches and the print resolution is 313×400 pixels.

The best part, definitely, is the image editing. We tried to make uglier photos as much as we can, with acceptable good quality and we’re delighted with the results. We aren’t sure whether the jokes were HP’s intentions, but whoever designed labels, frames, filters and fonts selections, obviously knows their customers’ needs. When you edit a photo, you can insert text bubbles on it, change the fonts and its color, background color of the text bubble, and add stickers and boxes. The font and frames are a very fun part. It will make your photos more “cool”, if your meaning of what is cool is the same as ours, but surely it isn’t. A real photo nerds probably want to make their photos look perfectly when they are printed out. We understand that, but this printer isn’t for them. We must mention that the printed photos are too warm and with a lot of orange color, but the sharpness and depth of field is very good for such a tiny, instant printer.

One of the favorite features is that you able to print photos directly from you Instagram and accounts.

• Small, lightweight, easy to carry
• Bluetooth connectivity
• A good app (ability to print photos from Instagram. etc.) with a lot of editing tools (crop, turn, filters, stickers, etc.)
• The photo paper is expensive (0.50/sheet)
• Photos are too warm
• The color is faded out in some areas

So, do you really want to buy HP Sprocket printer? We’re not sure. Although we’re thrilled, especially with app filters that allow you to make awesome photos! If you don’t have the money to throw, it’s better to buy an instant camera, so then you’ll have the camera and printer at almost the same price, as Sprocket costs 129.99 on Amazon and you must give the extra cash to order another paper packs if you want to print more photos.

HP Sprocket – Print instantly from your mobile phone

http://www.HP.com/go/hpsprocket. HP Sprocket is a tiny, portable photo printer you can take virtually anywhere and instantly print 2×3 inch snapshots from your.

At the end, Sprocket is a useful device targeted for a specific group of people who love to organize parties and entertain their guests in order to return home with the great memories. We think that Sprocket is a great toy for parties because everyone could take pictures with the mobile phone, connect to a Sprocket printer and instantly print photos which will be reminders of an unforgettable event.

The HP Sprocket instant printer is nothing more than a toy, but that’s exactly what we like about it. Just take the picture of your smile and print it. 

Didn’t find the right price? Set price alert below

Lowest price Product: HP Sprocket Portable Photo Printer, X7N07A, Print Social Media Photos on 2×3 Sticky-Backed Paper. White. 129.95

Didn’t find the right price? Set price alert below

Lowest price Product: HP Sprocket Portable Photo Printer, print social media photos on 2×3 sticky-backed paper. black (X7N08A). 129.95