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Released this past June, the Kodak Smile is a 10-megapixel camera that also features a tiny internal printer. To take a photo, you slide the cover to open the lens and use the LCD viewfinder on the back, not unlike the way many smartphone cameras function. After capturing an image, with the push of a button you can print out a photo that’s about the size of a standard business card (2 by 3 inches)—up to 40 prints on a single charge. With dimensions similar to a standard smartphone, the Smile is a follow-up to the Printomatic, a larger digital point-and-shoot camera with no LCD viewfinder that Kodak released in early 2018. In addition to the camera, the Smile series also includes a hand-size printer that can connect via Bluetooth to any smartphone to enable instant printing of images you’ve captured there. Both the Smile camera and printer use zero-ink technology and retail for $99.99 apiece on Amazon. In September, Kodak launched a larger version of the Smile camera called the Classic, which has a pop-up viewfinder along with the internal printer and retails for $149. The cameras and the printer were designed by the San Francisco–based studio Branch Creative. “The whole point is to get pictures off of people’s screens and off of the cloud and into people’s hands,” says Branch Creative partner Josh Morenstein.
A version of this article appeared in the October 2019 issue of Fast Company magazine.