Yellow Monster - a photo printer story

My wife and I were at MegaMall last night. As we were walking, we noticed a crowd gathered around a yellow computer monitor. We investigated ...

We were in the midst of an instant photo printer called Kodak Picture Maker G3 - a Yellow Machine. It's a digital photo printer. We had a good crowd with us observing the lady holding a phone (Nokia 6600?), printing images of her daughter. She sent the images to the Picture Maker via Bluetooth.

Siyempre, naki-usyoso kami. The picture maker had a flat touch screen with various photo editting functions. Photo enhance, crop, zoom, rotate, brightness, contrast and most of the basics. It also had a variety of borders to choose from.

What's unique about the Yellow Machine is the many ways by which you can send your digital image to the machine. After seeing bluetooth work, I wanted to check if it could read my SmartPhone's MMC card. After 3 attempts, we still couldn't get the machine to read my MMC.

We shifted to IR. It was a breeze sending the photos via IR. Then we got on with editing. Clip there, zoom here, borderize everything. Yung saleslady learned some new tricks when me and my wife tinkered with the Kodak Yellow Machine.

It costs only P20 pesos per 5R (?) print. And you have the choice of putting 1, 2 or 4 photos per 5R sheet of photo paper. Rather cheap and very convenient. We got our two prints within 25 seconds of giving the print command.

Earlier, I mentioned that you can send images in a variety of ways. You can send JPG, TIF and BMP through: Bluetooth, InfraRed, diskette, CD, MMC/SD, CompactFlash, Memory stick, and another card format I'm not familiar with (MX ba yun?).

But there was one more slot below the touch screen which wasn't labelled. I wondered what it could be. What format was it?

Aha! Credit card payments!? I investigated further, took out my credit card and put it in the slot half-way. It fit! I showed my wife and the saleslady. Sabi ko: "Ang galing naman nito!"

Then I pushed my card all the way in. It went right through into the machine without any resistance!!!!! Whoa! Give me back my credit card!!!! It was as if my card fell into a chasm in the belly of this Kodak machine!

We looked for an "eject" button, or a function on the screen where we can command the Yellow Monster to spit out my credit card. But to no avail.

We later realized the slot was where ID photos come out. It was an output slot, not an input slot. Stupeeeed.

Sheesh. It was an exciting time with the Yellow Machine, but it sucked to have my credit card eaten by the Yellow Monster. I will have to go back to MegaMall later to get my credit card. Hope it hasn't gone into shreds. But then again, I wouldn't mind if it did.

- Edwin

The Yellow Machine/Monster is located outside Watson's, near Cinderella, 2nd floor of MegaMall, Bldg A. Look for Michelle, the saleslady who we gave a lecture to. Enjoy!

~~~~~
Update: 2 August, 2004

Last week, Hedda, a college friend, was calling me on my cellphone. I didn't answer as I was in class (ang bait ko, 'no?). Then she texted me "Edong! nasa akin ang card mo!!!!".

Hahaha! Isn't that such a coincidence that my card, the one that triggered Kodak to pull-out their machine, ended up in the hands of a friend. It was a nice laugh we had when we told our side of the story.

I gave her a link to this article. And since then, I've been getting hits from Eastman Kodak, USA. So, to you guys at Kodak, sorry for the inconvenience! I still have a positive review of the Yellow Monster Machine, don't you think?

And Hedda, thanks for bringing back my card! Yan tuloy, mas-madali na ulit akong gumastos. herps!