Inkless Photo Printers Coming Sunday

This Sunday, Polaroid will introduce its new inkless printer that uses technology from Zink Imaging, according to the VentureBeat blog:

Zink, whose name means “zero ink,” has talked about its innovative technology for some time. It basically embeds chemical dyes inside paper. It passes the paper through a heater, which melts the dyes in the right places to create images on a piece of paper.

The advantages seem clear. Printers could be smaller, because you wouldn't need to have an ink delivery system in the machine. You also wouldn't run out of ink.

However, the cons also seem obvious. The paper will be more expensive and, for the time being, you won't have a choice of supplier. That is likely to reduce the flexibility you can have in interpreting images by using the paper whose characteristics seem closest to what you envisioned.