No ink cartridges, that’s the delightful promise kept by Wasabi, a new portable photo printer launching this week from Dell Canada. It uses special paper that has been pre-treated with hidden inks. As the paper passes through the printer head, the required colours are activated and the result is a glossy, clean photo with no smudges, fading, or curling. The twist is that the Wasabi is intended as a fun device, it can only print small photo booth-like strips that double as stickers so you can use them to decorate your locker, scrapbook, or even the walls of your room. It’s a party printer, one where guests can snap pics with their cellphones and send them wirelessly to the Wasabi for adhesive souvenirs.

It’s a small plastic box with a transparent, colour-tinted lid. You lift the lid and insert a stack of twelve strips of special ZINK paper. They’re sold in little packets like collectible trading cards. When you hit the power button a little happy face lights up and from there you can send it a picture file wirelessly from any Bluetooth device. The box then whirrs with the high-pitched sound of tiny motors, much like a remote-controlled miniature car, and then a little photo strip peeks it head out of a very thin slit in one end and in under sixty seconds you have a photo. Peel the backing off and it’s a sticker, that’s the Wasabi.

The photo paper is special 2” x 3” sheets created by a company called ZINK, which stands for zero ink. Each sheet has been embedded with dye crystals for all three of the main colours; cyan, yellow, and magenta. The crystals are colourless at first and protected by a special clear overcoat. Micro-heaters inside the printer head merely melt the crystals needed to produce the coloured dyes for the photo.

Naturally only ZINK paper can work with the Wasabi printer and the quality is surprisingly good, although not quite a match to the full sized photo printers on the market. The colours can be a bit dark and there’s some loss of detail, but more than fine for small sticker pics and it makes sense that Dell would go for a casual application for their first device. The photo sheets are sold in packets of 24 for $15 and 48 for $25. Each packet comes with a blue sheet printed with a barcode that activates the printer head for self-cleaning and alignment. Considering that you don’t have to buy ink cartridges, that’s pretty good.

In design the Wasabi is meant to be exclusively a mobile device. If you try to connect it to your home computer, it simply won’t work. It does have a USB port, but without any driver files your computer won’t recognize it. I believe the idea is to keep it very simple and here are your options:

First, you can connect your camera directly to the printer using a USB cable. As long as it is PictBridge-enabled (and most cameras are), you can use the LCD screen on your camera to select your print settings and send photos to the printer.

Secondly, you can use a Bluetooth 2.0 enabled device, such as cellphone or a laptop, and use the Bluetooth file transfer option to send your chosen photos to the printer. There’s no pairing involved, you merely bring up a photo from your gallery and choose the “send via Bluetooth” option. Your phone or laptop will automatically detect the printer and you just hit send.

The Wasabi will print any file sent to it as a borderless photo. It will automatically correct the photo for landscape or portrait orientation, so you don’t need to rotate it in advance, and will save it in memory. One of the few buttons on the printer allows you to reprint the last photo saved in memory so you don’t have to go through the trouble of sending it all over again.

The rechargeable lithium-ion battery takes an hour and a half to charge and thanks to a power-saving feature that shuts off the printer when not in use, will last through several packets and printing sessions.

The stickers themselves will stick on most objects, but one word of warning, even after a day they won’t come off without leaving a mess of adhesive glue, so be careful where you use them.

If you can find a use for the stickers, which I think is the Wasabi’s biggest challenge, it’s certainly the easy-to-use and fun device it’s made out to be. The real excitement is the ZINK paper which has great potential and hopefully will reach the point where we can eliminate ink cartridges for good.

The Wasabi is only available online through Dell.ca for $189, which is a bit high for a device intended for fun only. It is available in pink, black, and blue.