Cheap photo printer for photo booth

Dear Hivemind,

Do you have experience with small format photo printers? I am building an automated photo booth for my wedding and want it to spit out prints for people after they have their photo taken.

Requirements & preferences

  • Can be interfaced to a raspberry pi
  • Colour preferred but b&w might be cool
  • LOW COST - The printer should be used/craigslist/ebay
  • LOW COST CONSUMABLES - It will need to print a few hundred photos
  • Doesn’t need to be completely unattended - I can have someone reload it periodically

Also looking to beg/borrow/steal:

  • AC adapter for Canon T2i
  • Freestanding flash/reflector which can be triggered by the camera

Thanks!

1 Like

I don’t have personal experience, but you can often score a Canon Selphy
for ~$20 if you keep on top of listings:

http://vancouver.craigslist.ca/search/sss?sort=rel&query=selphy

Alternatively, have your setup tweet / post the full image somewhere, and
print the picture immediately on a thermal receipt printer.

I’ve used the Epson and the HP photo printers, and they both worked well.
Buying used means that you need to confirm that the printer is working and
not clogged. I let mine sit for about a year and it never recovered.

How low is low cost for you? These are high quality printers that usually
use dye sublimation rather than traditional inkjets, so the cartridges and
paper are pricey. I think it works out to about $0.30 per print.

I’ve run photo booths in the past - consumer level inkjet photo printers are generally too slow to keep up - taking more than a few minutes to print makes the entire thing drag.
The Selphy is a cheap option, as far as dye sub printers go,

consumables cost would be ~$0.50/ 4x6 photo.

I’d consider having a screen to display them, and get them all printed at costco after the fact - better results, and an 8th the cost.

They do this at the boeing factory, you get a slip with a url and a code from the printer and grab the jpg from the web. Theirs is busted because it keys off the email address - the last photo overwrites any previous ones (yes I would have used multiple email addrs if I knew).

I have made a photo booth for a friends wedding.

I ended up abandoning actually printing the photo there because of the time and cost of the consumables. Instead there was a keyboard and a screen that they could type in their email address and the photo would emailed to them. The screen was used to help with showing them the preview, the count down, and results. I used a raspberry PI, a HD web cam, Monitor, keyboard (no mouse), and python.

Wow. Thanks for all the great replies!

Having a physical print immediately available would be awesome, but I’m skeptical of these sorts of consumer printers with expensive consumables and slow print time. I will do some more research into this though.

I am also planning a photo slide show where a single projector can map photos on to a wall of several frames (with blank white paper inside). I could have photos from the photo booth go into that rotation maybe.

Otherwise I’ll just have it auto-post them to a twitter/insta feed. Easy peasy!

1 Like

For my wedding we had a Fuji Instax (a slightly older version of this one
http://www.londondrugs.com/Fuji-Instax-WIDE-300---600015272---Black/Silver/L8676470,default,pd.html).
People passed it around, took pictures of themselves and wrote us a nice
note on the back, and someone collected them all and pasted them on a book.
People also took pictures for themselves. The consumables are not very
cheap and it’s not very hackable, but was a lot of fun. I’d be happy to
lend you mine if you want it.

Looks like the 21rst century version of the Polaroid Instamatic camera that I
grew up with.

Neato, film isn’t dead.

It’s not really that 21st century, at all. It’s practically
indistinguishable from a polaroid (at least the wide version, for some
reason they do one with tiny pictures), nothing digital. I always thought
they would quickly put out a mini printer version of it but I still haven’t
seen one like that.