I really like the simplicity of the Smile Classic, but there is one major drawback: It prints absolutely every image you shoot. There’s no screen, no preview. Printing everything, even the images you dislike, will make the Smile Classic more expensive over time. This also affects battery life, which Kodak claims will print 35 images per charge.

A Go-Anywhere Printer

The print you get from the Smile Classic isn’t a Polaroid-style print with the puffy edges. Zink cameras and printers like the Smile Classic produce more traditional prints, like what you’d get from a professional printer (but without the professional quality). The Smile Classic churns out sticky-backed 3.25-inch x 4.5-inch images with a quarter-inch white border.

The prints are larger than all the other Zink cameras and printers we’ve tested, which all print smaller, rectangular 2- x 3-inch images. The larger size gives prints more life, and the border makes them feel more like a proper photo than an instant print.

That said, Zink isn’t the highest-quality printing. In fact, it’s nowhere near the quality of what you can get from printing machines at your local drugstore. But it’s in your hand seconds after you press the shutter on the Smile Classic, something your local drugstore will never manage to do.

I did find the results of the Smile Classic to be the best of any Zink printer I’ve tested. The tonal range is good, and colors render reasonably close to true. The noticeable improvement in the Smile Classic comes at the dark end of the tonal range, a place the Zink printing technology struggles. You still won’t get a deep, rich black, but to my eye these images are closer. I encountered some strong banding, or rough edges between similar colors. This happens sometimes in scenes like a sunset, where the line between red and orange is speckled rather than smoothly transitioning from one to the next.

The Classic holds 10 of the new, larger Zink papers, and the refill packs are small enough that you can throw a few in your pocket and you’ll hardly notice them.

Printing From Your Phone
The Kodak Classic app for iOS and Android turns the Smile Classic into an instant printer. Connect your phone to the Classic via Bluetooth and you can print any image on your device. For the sample images in the section above, I transferred photos from a full-frame DSLR to my phone and then printed them.

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