Hybrid digital cameras withbuilt-in printersmerge modern technology with theclassic ability to near instantly hold a print in your hands. The Kodak Mini Shot 3 Retro is one such camera, and it puts a printer with a digital camera in a charming retro body. Besides printing the photos that the built-in camera takes, the Mini Shot 3 Retro can also use Bluetooth to printphotos from a smartphone.
But, while the Kodak Mini Shot 3 Retro has vintage charm and colorful prints, the camera has an unusual flaw: when the camera powers off, all the digital files are deleted. In essence, they literally self-destruct. While I could try to romanticize the idea of a digital camera that doesn’t actually save digital images as a modern disposable, the camera itself doesn’t offer enough vintage charm to warrant such idealization.
Can the print quality salvage the Mini Shot 3 Retro’s camera flaws? Or is this mobile photo printer a hard pass?
KODAK Mini Shot 3 Retro
The Kodak Mini Shot 3 Retro has charming looks and a colorful built-in printer. The printer spits out three-inch images and can also connect to a smartphone to print images from there. But, oddly, all images are deleted once the camera powers down. That mixed with the poor image quality of the built-in camera makes the Mini Shot 3 Retro difficult to recommend.
How we test and review products at Pocket-lint
We don’t do arm-chair research. We buy and test our own products, and we only publish buyer’s guides with products we’ve actually reviewed.
Price, specs, and availability
Don’t let the Kodak in the name fool you. The Kodak name is actually licensed off to other companies, which means a majority of the “Kodak” products that you see on Amazon are actually manufactured by a different company. The company pays to use the Kodak name and logo so that they can stand out among the other products from unrecognizable brands. In the case of this camera-printer combo, the Mini Shot 3 Retro is produced by Prinics Co. Ltd.
The Kodak Mini Shot 3 Retro sells for about $130 on Amazon when bundled with 60 sheets of photopaper. Oddly enough, the bundle without the extra paper has a list price of $170, making the bundle the obvious choice.
The company lists very few details in the specifications for this printer, but that list includes a 20-point battery life and a 1.77-inch LCD screen. The printer recharges using a micro-USB port.
What I like about the Kodak Mini Shot 3 Retro
The printer creates colorful three-inch images
While portable photo printers are no longer hard to find, a vast majority of them spit out prints that are around business-card-sized. The Kodak Mini Shot 3 churns out square images that are three inches on each side, which is considerably larger than most, while still maintaining the printer’s compact form factor. There’s a small white border at the bottom, but this piece isn’t included in that 3x3 dimension and tears off easily if you want a borderless image. Or, you can add white borders in the app or even one that looks like the edges of real film.
That photopaper comes preloaded in a plastic cartridge that also contains the ink. So, you only need to pop open the side door, slide out the old cartridge, and slide the new one in. While it does mean quite a bit of plastic waste, it also makes the printer nearly foolproof to load.
The Kodak name is actually licensed off to other companies, which means a majority of the “Kodak” products that you see on Amazon are actually manufactured by a different company.
Each cartridge has enough for ten prints. Besides being easy to install, the paper is fairly affordable, costing around 30 cents per image. Yes, you may get 4x6 images from a lab for less, but mobile photo printers are designed for convenience – not affordability. In comparison, the cost for Fujifilm Instax Mini film packs is around $1 each and Zink replacement paper for Canon’s line of printers costs around 60 cents per print.
The Instax Mini Link 3 turns my phone into an instant film camera – and I’m obsessed
Photos should exist in physical form. This mobile printer makes it easy.
The print quality is pretty good considering the small size of the image. The picture lack some sharpness and detail, but that’s to be expected for an image of this size. The colors are beautiful, however, and tend to stay close to the tones in the digital file.
While the mobile printer has a camera built-in, the Mini Shot 3 Retro connects to an iPhone or Android device over Bluetooth to print out images shot on a smartphone instead. The print samples above all came from either my iPhone or mirrorless camera but were wirelessly printed on the 3 Retro. The connection process is incredibly simple. After downloading the app, you need to open the Bluetooth settings to connect. From there, the app is pretty self-explanatory, though most of the built-in editing tools in Kodak Photo Printer don’t do as good of a job as other photo editing apps.
What I didn’t like about the Kodak Mini Shot Retro 3
The camera is among the worst I’ve ever used
Imagine buying a digital camera, opening the instructions, and seeing in tiny six-point font these words: “Taken photos are deleted when the camera is powered off.” Yes, you read that right – the Kodak Mini Shot 3 Retro is a digital camera that automatically deletes each and every one of the photos that you take.
Presumably, you’ll print the good ones before you turn the camera off. But, failing to save the digital images negates a majority of the benefits of choosing a hybrid digital-instant-printer over a real instant film camera. Yes, you can see if the image turns out using the tiny screen at the back before printing it, but if you want those photos digitized, you’ll need to print and then scan them.
Fujifilm’s Instax Mini Link 3 turns your phone into a portable photo booth for $100
The Mini Link 3 can add AR effects to your photos before you print them out.
I could romanticize this shortcoming and say the 3 Retro feels like a digital disposable camera, except the photos on old film disposables were never thrown away, just the camera. To make matters worse, the camera sometimes freezes up, so I twice lost images before they were printed when I had to restart.
Hybrid digital-instant-print tech from other companies, including Fujifilm and Canon, allows you to both print and save the digital file, effectively allowing you to share physical prints in person and digital on social media. Why Prinics decided to forgo the SD card slot or internal memory to keep at least a few digital files saved is beyond me.
This Pentax camera makes film photography easy for beginners
As the brand’s first film camera in 20 years, the Pentax 17 is a mishmash of old and new – and that’s a great thing.
While reading the self-destruct warning in the instructions set up my expectations at near zero, my disappointment with the Mini Shot 3 Retro plummeted further when I actually used the camera. Image quality is very poor indoors, but when you take the camera outside, the brightest spots of the image are blown out to white. I couldn’t even take a good photo of the fall colors as all the orange was severely washed out – my iPhone did a noticeably better job. In the image above, the photo on the left was taken by the Retro 3 and the one on the right by my iPhone, of the very same tree. There’s probably a reason the company doesn’t share key specifications at all – I imagine the megapixel count is in the single digits and the sensor smaller than what’s in any smartphone.
Imagine buying a digital camera, opening the instructions, and seeing in tiny six-point font these words: “Taken photos are deleted when the camera is powered off.”
Yes, the Mini Shot 3 Retro is under $200, so naturally, it isn’t going to take photos as well as a $1,500 smartphone will. But, the other cheap digital-instant hybrids I’ve tried had some retro charm to the imperfections, where the Mini 3 – quite frankly – just feels like cheap garbage.
While I mostly liked the printer built inside (which is significantly better than the built-in camera), the printing technology is a bit slow and prone to mishaps. The printer coats the paper three times, one for yellow, magenta and cyan, then a fourth coat for lamination. While this is probably why the colors on the prints are so good, if the printer is bumped at all, you end up with a paper jam, which is what happened when I tried carrying the printer around as it printed. It’s best left to do its thing – which does take some time with the four total passes – on a flat surface.
Fujifilm’s smallest Instax camera left me wanting more
Fujifilm’s Instax Pal is a cute accessory but may not be the best option for those look for a mini film camera.
The battery life on the Mini Shot 3 Retro is also fairly poor. You can only get around 20 prints with it. Which may be fine for printing out photos for a scrapbooking session, but don’t expect to carry this around all day and take a full day’s worth of pictures.
Is the Kodak Mini Shot Retro 3 worth it?
This is a gadget that’s best skipped
No. The built-in camera doesn’t save any digital files and offers very poor image quality. The built-in printer itself is great for the price, but you can get the printer without the camera for a lower price, in a smaller size, and just print out photos from your smartphone instead.
Pocket-lint’s Anthony Marcusaloved the Kodak Mini 2 Retro Printer, which prints out business-card-sized prints, and I suspect the brand’s 3x3 version of that mobile printer, theMini 3 Retro 4 Pass, will be equally good at colorful prints on affordable paper. Another option is theCanon Ivy 2, a portable photo printer that prints out sticky-back photos, or theFujifilm Instax Mini Link 3, which uses real instant film.
Best camera deals: Save on some of the best models
Capture beautiful portraits, action shots, cinematic videos, and more at a discount.
Some users will still want a built-in camera, either for a preteen that doesn’t have a smartphone or for the experience and charm of using a dedicated point-and-shoot. If you want a digital-print hybrid, there are far better options that still allow you to save those digital files and offer more retro charm in the image quality as well. My favorite among these hybrids is theFujifilm Instax Mini Evo camera. It’s packed with retro charm, and you can still have those digital files even if you run out of paper. The downside is that the film is significantly more expensive than Kodak’s paper.
This is a definite skip for me. I would instead opt for a digital-instant hybrid that doesn’t self-delete all the photos, or at the very least chooseKodak’s similar printerthat doesn’t have the built-in camera but still offers the same colorful, affordable prints.
