Review: HP Sprocket

Many technology evangelists love talking about abundance and how it is a good thing. An example they often cite is how the cost of a photograph has practically become nothing: just a quick snap on your phone, filed away on endless storage.

But this is also a problem. When people are asked what they would save from a burning house, many go for the photo albums. At least, many used to. I suspect that the younger the person, the less likely that will be the answer, purely because they never owned photo albums. We have gotten so used to ample photos that we no longer regard them as precious. Quite the opposite: we rely on artificial intelligence simply to catalogue what we have!

But there is always a compulsion to back to the physical, as seen with vinyl records and other analogue items. So why not photos? Wouldn't it be great to easily produce copies of your favourite snaps, right there on quality photographic paper? I'm certainly interested in that, which is why the HP Sprocket appealed to me. Sadly, though, it has not quite scratched my particular itch.

The HP Sprocket is a stylish gadget, roughly the size of a portable hard drive. It operates on a battery, charged through USB, and spits out photos from special HP Zink paper that requires no ink. The photos also have an adhesive back once you peel away the cover, essentially turning them into little stickers.

An accompanying app for iOs and Android makes an easy job of printing photos, including basic tools for cropping, colour correction and some fancy effects if that is your thing.

It is very easy to operate, even load. You can see a lot of care has been taken to ensure the Sprocket won't confuse anyone. It's even easy to replace the paper and the printer does its job quickly, quietly and with incredibly little fuss. HP has long been known for superb engineering and design - the Sprocket embodies that reputation completely.

At R2 000 it is not even all that expensive, not for what you get. Short of finding a vintage Polaroid camera, this is probably the nicest personal instant photo printing system I have ever encountered.

So why am I not entirely happy? My primary gripe is the photo sizes, of which there is one: 5x7.5 cm. That is smaller than a business card. Personally I'd like to have more regular-sized photos, which can be popped into a frame or stuck in a book. You could do it with these as well, but they are too small to really work in those formats. Maybe they can fit in wallets, but does anyone even keep photos in there anymore?

The adhesive backs offer some choices. The craft-minded could maybe make novelty fridge magnets or other creative items. This would be an excellent gadget for quickly creating small photos at parties or other events. The low price makes that very feasible, though the R199 for a pack of 20 photo papers is pricey. At about R10 a photo, that is two to three times what printing regular photos (9x12 centimeters) cost.

So while I applaud the HP Sprocket's design and delivery, the small photo size really feels like it's narrowing its options. If the printer offered the traditional 9x12 photo size or let me buy paper at half the cost, that would be different. I'd be filling my second photo album by now.

But if you don't mind the tiny photos, the quality is fantastic, the adhesive backs are surprisingly useful, the software is very decent and the price is truly nice.