Decoding Design

Instaprint: The location-based photo-booth for Instragram

Instaprint: The location-based photo-booth for Instragram

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New York-based company has designed a locative printer to go with faux-vintage-photo app Instagram. It's Instagram meets photobooth.

Facebook isn't the only company looking to capitalize off of the popularity of Instagram: Breakfast, a New York-based company with founders so ahead of the curve they call themselves the "custom tailors of the tech world," has made a locative printer to go with the faux-vintage-photo app.

The printer, called Instaprint, works by being configured with a hashtag or a location and then getting hooked up to the Internet. It then connects to Instagram and looks for photos that are uploaded with that specific location or hashtag, and when it comes across a photo, it prints it out.

Instaprint is to photo booths like Instagram is to Polaroids. According to Breakfast, Instaprint seeks to fill the hole left by analog when it was replaced by digital: "Deep down we all still miss the uniqueness of those square little photos you'd hold comfortably in your hand," they say in their description of the product.

The printer itself uses what Breakfast is calling an "ink-less technology that pulls the color from the paper itself," and can be "daisy-chained" together for higher output, needing just one of the connected printers to have a controller and Wi-Fi module.

Even the set up is clean and simple, like the app, and like the printer. The printer will show up on your phone or computer as a Wi-Fi network-- and once you connect, all you have to do is set the Wi-Fi network you want it to use and then connect it to your Instaprint device using your account.

It's small, too. The printer is just over half a foot wide and half a foot tall, and only about three inches deep-- all of which can hold up to about 50 sheets of the custom two by three inch paper.

As pointed out on Instaprint's Kickstarter as well as on's new design blog, Instaprint seems like a great fit for weddings, parties and events of any kind. Guests with smartphones just have to tag the photo, nothing else is needed to create instant memories or favors, or just to make the party look cool with a fun filter.

The first prototype was developed in 2011, and the company hopes that their Kickstarter campaign will help test the market for their product, even though they have already started renting out prototypes to events as big as the Grammys and concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden.

[Wired Design]
Images: Breakfast

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Beth Carter

Contributing Editor
