How does the famous quote go? Why settle for e, when z is available? It's something like that. Polaroid is looking to eliminate the hassles of ink, ink cartridges and the like with the Zink printing products. Zink stands for zero ink and is a seemingly simple and innovative way to completely demolish the multi-million dollar ink cartridge business.

Zink works with special paper, which is responsible for the printing process. Each sheet of paper consists of five layers of material. The magic is within the middle three layers of paper, which happens to be cyan, yellow and magenta (like a traditional printer) sheets. Each sheet contains corresponding dyed crystals. The heat produced from a Zink-enable device is capable of extracting color from the sheets and producing an image. Eat your heart out, McFly! This is the future! The first Zink product, which is a Bluetooth printer, will be available later this year for $100.

Via Gizmag