Socialmatic: 21st Century Polaroid

We recently wrote about Instaprint, the printer that prints Instagram photos from a wall-mounted printer. Instagram has become one of the most downloaded applications on mobile devices, and attracted a lot of attention last month when it was bought by Facebook for $1 billion.

ADR Studio created the Socialmatic camera project, a modern-times Polaroid. The design of the camera is directly inspired by the Instagram icon found on mobile devices. The Socialmatic camera takes pictures, applies Instagram effects and prints the typical square photographs directly from the camera onto custom made paper sheets. The integrated software can connect to the Internet and enables users to share their shots directly on Facebook. Nevertheless, the creators are more interested in real life sharing — they have anticipated a glue strip on the backside of the sheet that facilitates public display of the image. A dedicated space for comments could also be left empty if the user wishes to do so.

Socialmatic is only a concept so far, but it is certainly an interesting idea. However, the last post-Polaroid attempts at combining camera and printers have failed to conquer the market so far due to the expensive consumables.