Many companies have a hard time distinguishing themselves from the crowd at CES, so Polaroid played the celebrity card using Lady Gaga to unveil a series of products she actually helped design. Making up Polaroid’s new Grey Label line is a digital camera that prints out photos and a mobile printer – both using ZINK’s Zero Ink thermal printing technology – but the most obviously Gaga-esque product is a pair of sunglasses that feature a built-in camera for taking pics and vids, along LCD screens built into the lenses to display them.
The GL20 Camera Glasses contain a concealed 5-megapixel camera that can capture video and stills. It can be set up to capture images at 10 or 60 second intervals, or manually via a button on the arm of the glasses. The images can be saved to an SD card and transferred to a computer via Bluetooth or a USB port, also located in the arm, to be uploaded to the internet, or displayed immediately on two 1.5 inch LCD displays embedded in the lenses to be viewed by people around you. Oh, and they’ll also protect your eyes from the Sun’s rays.
At the unveiling of the sunglasses at CES 2011, Lady Gaga said she first envisaged such a concept years ago and made some glasses out of iPod screens that played movies, which she used on her Fame Ball tour. Ironically, the GL10 Instant Mobile Printer that was also unveiled can print the images from the GL20 sunglasses or any Bluetooth smartphone, but not the iPhone.
Both the GL10 Instant Mobile Printer and GL30 Instant Digital Camera use ZINK Zero Ink thermal technology to print Polaroid-style photos. The GL30 also saves images digitally if you want to save on the cartridges, which are compatible with both devices and good for 10 prints.
The Polaroid GL10 Instant Printer will be available in May for US$149.99, while the GL20 Camera Glasses and GL30 Instant Digital Camera will be released later this year with pricing still to be announced.
