Impossible Instant Lab Shipping August 29th for $299

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When The Impossible Project announced its Impossible Instant Lab back in September 2012, it turned to Kickstarter to raise $250,000 to fund the project. After the Internet got wind of the smartphone-to-instant-photo printing device, the fundraising campaign blew past its goal and ended up with a total of $559,232 from 2,509 supporters.

Today the company announced that the Impossible Instant Lab will be hitting store shelves on August 29th, 2013 for a retail price of $299.

In case you haven’t heard of the Instant Lab before, here’s a quick primer: it’s a novel hybrid between an instant camera and a printer, and helps turn your digital smartphone snaps into actual instant photos (the world’s first device to do so). For now, the device is designed specifically for iPhones and iPod Touch devices.

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The process is quite simple. After a photo is loaded up onto the companion app, you place your phone face down onto the cradle on top of the device. The app then exposes the instant film with the photo you’re “printing,” and the exposed instant film is spat out of the device as if the “camera” had just taken an ordinary photo.

We were able to see the Instant Lab in action when it was unveiled at Photokina in Germany in September 2012. Here’s a quick demo video we captured:

From what we were able to see, the quality of the resulting snaps is “so so.” It’ll be a fun way to turn your digital pictures into physical prints, and will certainly be a device that’ll help The Impossible Project sell its collection of instant films, but the $299 price tag may be difficult for many photography enthusiasts to stomach.

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