Kodak’s new instant camera and printer line capture the clunky side of nostalgia
As my colleague Vlad Savov noted at IFA last year, legacy camera companies like Kodak and Polaroid have now become “brands of sadness.” Once industry-defining forces, their names don’t mean too much anymore after licensees have slapped their logos onto everything from cheap laptops to selfie sticks. You can see all of this in effect at Kodak’s CES booth every year where a company called C+A Global showcases all of the random Kodak-branded gadgets as far as the eye can see. This year, among the baby monitors and LED light bulbs, it’s bringing a new line of instant cameras and printers called Smile.
There’s the Kodak Smile Instant Print digital camera, which is a 10-megapixel camera with an LCD viewfinder, a 10-second timer, and automatic...