Where do all the thermal printer kids' cameras come from?
I own a thermal printer camera intended for kids. I got it in October intending to use it for the holiday season(s), and brought it with me on my trip to see family. Not everyone in my family was super into the idea of it, but it was fun and funny to be able to take pictures and immediately hand them off to my relatives. I now have a huge stack of receipt paper photos on my desk.
There are tons of these cameras for sale with different plastic housings. They all have similar firmware and operating systems and they all have the same (imo) unnecessary features - a full digital screen on the back of the camera, for instance. I'd prefer one that has NO screen, and just pushes the photo out - no memory, no reprints. That's the retro feeling these cameras seem like they should be going for. Retro vibes are the reason adults like them, anyway... and there's definitely a real but small adult audience for these toys.
But I know the actual target audience - little little kids, people fully thirty years younger than me - doesn't see these as nostalgia toys. To them, they're Baby's First Digital Camera... or really, baby's first phone. My thermal printer camera comes with a smartphone-like UI on a big digital screen. It has terrible, terrible GAMES on it. It seems like pretty much all these cameras come with these big screens. The camera uses the screen to show you multiple photo modes you can scroll through, including color-shifted modes, image warping effects, overlay frames, and so on.
I recently followed a rabbithole on this stuff and found a reddit comment linking to the wholesaler who makes most of these cameras. Most of the ones on Amazon are from "Pardo Kids Camera". That link will take you to their thermal printer product line.
I was fascinated by that site's summary of the thermal printer craze:
Camera Market
From the year before last, thermal instant print camera has become popular in Shenzhen factory and selling abroad, but this year is a rapid developing period for kids print camera. Interestingly, many of the factories and companies has reached consensus to develop their own private tooling for kids print camera. So you may find various tooling shape under this print camera category. Kids instant print camera has not reached its summit period or flouring stage yet, there’s still big potential for this niche market and its application scenario is becoming all the more diversify including but unlimited to kids entertaining, class study, paper and documents printing assistance etc. This may have been a strange idea to EU and American customers but to use it as printing of homework errors has been popular in China and other Asian countries like Korea. Up till now, chipset Jianrong has taken a big market share in most of the kids print camera PCBA. The major difference lies in the different shape and tooling as mentioned.
Wild as hell. So these manufacturers don't think that toy art cameras for adults will catch on, but they DO think that kids might want to use thermal printers for like, daily lifestyle shit, like homework. I really do not understand what "printing of homework errors" means, but that doesn't sound like entertainment... it sounds like utility?
I have no idea if the primary audience for thermal printer cameras in the US and Europe is adults, but it's sure as fuck the only audience I've seen talking about them - people buying the cameras for themselves, rather than for their kids. Maybe I'd have a different perspective if I watched more Mom Content or some shit, but the only people I've seen writing about them are childless millennials like myself. Perhaps the weirdo toy camera audience in the US just contains a bigger percentage of adults generally? This one is particularly popular with adults, which makes sense to me, because it has no screen and is distinctly Nostalgia Oriented.
Brendon and I gave our nephew an old school cheap digicam a few years ago, and he loved it... but it was a very typical camera with a full screen on the back. I don't think he would have loved it as much if it had no screen on the back, no video feature, etc.
I am just speculating! I don't know much about this industry at all and have no way of telling whether I'm right. But I found that camera wholesaler website fascinating.