Building a Desktop Kodak Photo Kiosk
Warner built this miniature Kodak photo kiosk for his desk to replace the full-size version that takes up too much space in his home.
Remember those big yellow Kodak photo kiosks that used to sit in a corner of every drug store and Walmart? James Warner of the Snappiness YouTube channel has one in his home, because he’s a photography nerd that is as susceptible to nostalgia as the rest of us. But his wife isn’t and she hated the oversized monstrosity, so Warner built this miniature Kodak photo kiosk for his desk.
This scaled-down Kodak photo kiosk has all of the beauty and most of the functionality of the original machine, but it takes up less space and far less of Mrs. Warner’s patience.
Warner can snap photos on any of his dozens of cameras, then pop the memory card into the pint-sized photo kiosk. He can then use the built-in display and controls to select the photos he wants. Then, at the tap of a button, it will start churning out nice photo prints.
On the hardware side, this is really just a custom-designed and 3D-printed shell for a modern photo printer. Warner printed that shell on the new Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 in order to take advantage of its multi-color capabilities. If you’re curious about that 3D printer, you can read my review here.
It is probably sacrilegious, but the photo printer inside is a model from Canon. There are Kodak-branded photo printers on the market, but they don’t have the features that Warner wanted. Namely, he wanted to be able to print photos from physical media, but the Kodak models only accept photos sent from a smartphone app. The Canon printer takes memory cards and had a screen with interface buttons, so it got the honor of becoming a Kodak photo kiosk.
Now Warner can sell the original photo kiosk to some lucky Facebook Marketplace user and Mrs. Warner can get some space back in their home.