At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Our Verdict
The Kodak Smile printer is a fairly simple bit of kit, but it gets the job done. Zink prints aren’t the highest quality in the world, but they’re a great way to get your favourite photos off your phone or Instagram and into a real print or sticker. The Smile app has a decent array of editing options, and both the app and printer are easy to use, which isn’t true for every portable photo printer on the market.
Best Prices Today: Kodak Smile Instant Digital Printer
Very often when you’re out and about with a group of friends or at a family event someone will take an amazing photo that everyone says you should have printed. But no-one ever remembers to get it printed.
Kodak has just the thing for this type of scenario: its Smile instant digital printer connects to your phone over Bluetooth and allows you to print any photo right then and there. The prints are small, just like the printer itself, but easy to print on the move and in an instant.
Price and availability
You might also notice that Kodak also makes a Smile Instant Camera , which also doubles as a printer for the same price. That might make the camera model seem like better value, but bear in mind that the camera only lets you print photos transferred over a MicroSD card, and has more limited editing options than the Smile printer.
Kodak Smile Printer review
While the Smile Camera lets you take your own shots with the device itself, this digital printer can make use of the higher-quality images on the phone that’s always in your pocket. It also enables easy sharing of photos edited in the Kodak Smile app, which is available for iOS and Android.
Using the Smile app you connect the printer to your phone or tablet over Bluetooth, and from there can access photos saved to your phone’s camera roll or any you have in Instagram, Facebook, or Google Photos if you log into those accounts.
The instructions are simple to follow for all users and make printing on the Kodak easier than composing the picture in the first place. The 700mAh lithium-ion battery should be good for printing 40 pictures on a single charge, before recharging over Micro-USB.
One area of concern for instant printers such as the Kodak Smile is their print quality. Compared to rivals the Kodak fares pretty well, with fairly true-to-life colours, but smaller details are lost. For scenic shots and portraits it does the job.
Before printing you get options to add filters, frames and stickers, and crop or adjust the exposure on an image if required. You can also use the Smile app to embed a video into photos, which you can scan using your phone like a QR code to watch back – though we wonder how many will actually use the feature.
The design is very similar to that of the HP Sprocket, and actually almost identical in size at 117.5×81.5x25mm, but you get more colour options here with Blue, Red, White, Green and Black. As with the Sprocket it’s a sleek device that is rectangular in shape with rounded corners. An LED bar runs is visible where prints are released, activated when the printer is turned on.
Each pack contains a blue card that is inserted on top of the paper to ensure you put it in the right way round, and the Smile will spit this out before it begins printing.
Verdict
The Kodak Smile printer is a fairly simple bit of kit, but it gets the job done. Zink prints aren’t the highest quality in the world, but if you don’t mind a slight loss of detail – usually OK in the smaller format anyway – they’re a great way to get your favourite photos off your phone or Instagram and into a real print or sticker.
The Smile app has a decent array of editing options, and both the app and printer are easy to use, which isn’t true for every portable photo printer on the market.
Best Prices Today: Kodak Smile Instant Digital Printer
At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Our Verdict
If you’re after a quirky camera that’ll let you take snaps and print them out for your friends or family, but aren’t worried about the quality, the Kodak Smile Instant Print Digital Camera might be a good option for you. But some of the nostalgia of the instant camera is taken away by the design, the ability to choose not to print bad photos and the lack of the traditional developing film.
Best Prices Today: Kodak Smile Instant Print Digital Camera
Kodak’s Smile Instant Print Digital Camera is half instant printer , half instant camera . It can (in theory) print photos you’ve already taken using a different camera and then transferred onto a MicroSD card, but it also has a built-in camera that means you can use it to capture photos on the device itself and print those too.
This may sound great, but the downside is that we found it does neither thing particularly well. Its camera isn’t fantastic, and it’s very slow so taking photos of kids or animals is almost impossible. You are able to choose not to print bad photos, which can’t be said for all instant cameras, but those you do print are likely to suffer with strange exposure and less than great quality.
We’ve always found Zink printers like this one to be less than satisfactory when it comes to their quality. They tend to lose warmth, clarity and contrast, so you might not love the photos it produces.
The benefit of this kind of printer is that you don’t have to wait for photos to develop, but that’s also part of the appeal of your more traditional instant camera that uses film. As mentioned, you can also choose not to print bad photographs and you can edit them as we explain more about below, as well as exporting them to other devices should you wish to.
When taking photos with the Smile Instant Print Digital Camera, or after you’ve captured one, you can add a border to make the print look more like a traditional instant camera photo, or add monochrome, vintage or aqua filters. These can create some nice effects and we often preferred these edited results to a straightforward print.
There’s also a photobooth option that lets you take two photos to print side by side on one sheet, a timer, and a surprisingly effective flash should you need one.
You can store three photos within the internal memory of the device, but it’s recommended that you add a MicroSD card into the dedicated slot for more storage (up to 256GB). You should also be able to print any photos on the MicroSD card that come from other devices, but during our testing we could not get this to work. All of the photos we added to the MicroSD card, whether in a folder or not, were not recognised as data by the printer and therefore unable to print.
When it comes to the design and build of the Kodak Smile, we found it to be sturdy and compact, which is handy for popping into a bag to take out and about. It has a lanyard attachment available too. The shutter button is easily accessible and the viewing screen isn’t amazing, but does the job and is more than you’ll get from some similarly priced rivals. We found that the battery life was good, with a handy indicator at the bottom of the screen to help you avoid it running out mid print.
It’s a shame the design is more printer-like than camera-like. Some of the charm of an instant camera is taken away by the slightly clunky, boxy design. There are several fun colour options available, though, including black, pink, blue, green and yellow.
If you’re unsure about whether the Kodak Smile is right for you, you might like to check out our round-ups of the best portable printers and the best instant cameras.
Verdict
It’s really tricky to rate the Kodak Smile Instant Print Digital Camera. On the one hand, it’s a compact device that has almost every feature we could ask for in an instant camera/printer hybrid. A decent screen, a microSD card slot, a flash, good battery life, speedy printing, editing capabilities and an affordable price tag. On the other hand, the editing capabilities are limited, the microSD card slot seems to have trouble finding images not taken on the Smile itself, and the prints are low quality when they arrive.
Best Prices Today: Kodak Smile Instant Print Digital Camera
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