The Curious Case of the Kodak Craft Printer: A Maker’s Deep Dive into a Glorious Failure

It started, as these things often do, in a dusty corner of my workshop. Tucked behind a retired 3D printer and a box of assorted stepper motors was a name I hadn’t thought about in years: KODAK. The box, for a “Verite Craft 6” printer, promised a revolution. It whispered of a world where you could print not just on flimsy paper, but on leather, canvas, magnets, even wood.

My curiosity piqued, I did what any modern maker-detective would do: I consulted the digital oracle, Google. What I found wasn’t a product page, but a digital ghost town. A handful of reviews, clinging to an old Amazon listing, told a bizarrely split story. On one side, users hailed it as a five-star gateway to new creative realms. On the other, a chorus of one-star warnings lamented a finicky, non-functional “brick in a box.”

So, what was the deal? Was this machine an unsung hero of the maker movement, or just another beautiful, broken dream? I decided to pull on my metaphorical deerstalker hat and investigate. This isn’t a product review; it’s a teardown of an idea, an autopsy of an ambition to bring industrial magic to the craft table.

Wrestling with Rigidity: The Mechanical Heartbeat

The first clue lies in the machine’s most celebrated feature: its “uniquely designed craft materials handling tray.” To understand why this is a big deal, you have to think about how your average office printer works. It’s a device built for speed and conformity, expecting a constant diet of thin, flexible paper. Its internal pathway is a series of tight curves, designed to flip and guide paper in a compact space.

Now, imagine trying to force a slice of oak veneer through that. It’s like trying to get a plank of wood to go down a playground slide. It won’t bend. It will jam. The printer will scream in protest.

The Kodak Verite Craft 6 seemingly solved this with a simple, elegant piece of mechanical engineering. Its craft tray creates a much flatter, almost straight-through path. Think of it like the difference between a winding country road and an airport’s luggage conveyor belt. The luggage (your craft material) is placed on a sturdy platform and carried directly through the printing mechanism without being asked to perform any gymnastics.

This design has to overcome a fundamental physics problem: friction. Paper is light and consistent. But a piece of leather might have a suede-like, high-friction back, while a magnet sheet is slick and smooth. The printer’s rollers need to act less like simple office workers and more like all-terrain vehicle tires, adjusting their grip and torque to confidently move whatever you throw at them. This mechanical robustness is the first piece of the puzzle, and it’s a clever bit of engineering. But it’s also, as we’ll see, a potential point of failure if the material isn’t just right.

An Alchemist’s Ink: The Chemical Conundrum

Getting a piece of wood through a printer is one thing. Getting ink to actually stick to it in a clean, crisp line is a whole other realm of science. This is where we move from mechanical engineering to chemistry, and it’s where the real magic—and potential madness—begins.

The printer uses inkjet technology. At its core, this process is a marvel of micro-physics. In most consumer printers, a tiny resistor flash-heats a minuscule amount of ink to hundreds of degrees, creating a vapor bubble that expands and ejects a single, microscopic droplet of ink onto the page. This happens thousands of times a second.

On paper, this is a solved problem. Paper is porous, a microscopic forest of fibers eager to drink up the ink. But what happens on the wild, untamed surfaces of craft materials?

Here, the ink has to contend with the laws of surface tension and wettability. Think of a raindrop on a freshly waxed car hood. It beads up, refusing to spread out. This is because the water’s surface tension is stronger than its attraction to the slick, non-porous surface. Now imagine trying to print a high-resolution photo with millions of those tiny, rebellious beads.

This is the challenge the Verite Craft 6’s ink and technology had to face:

• On Canvas or Cork: These surfaces are porous, almost like paper. The danger here is bleeding, where the ink soaks in too much and spreads, turning sharp lines into fuzzy messes. The ink’s formula needs to be viscous enough to stay put.
• On Leather: This is a semi-porous, organic material. The ink has to partially absorb to anchor itself, but not so much that it blurs. It has to be durable enough to withstand the flexing of the material.
• On Magnets or Wood Veneer: These are the ultimate test. They are largely non-porous. The ink can’t rely on absorption. It must possess special chemical properties, likely advanced polymers, that act as binding agents to cure and adhere to the surface. It’s less like staining and more like applying a micro-thin layer of paint.

This explains why some users might have had brilliant results while others had smudged disasters. A slightly oilier piece of leather, or a wood veneer with a different finish, could completely change the chemical equation, turning a perfect print into a mess. The printer wasn’t just a machine; it was a chemistry experiment with every single print.

The Verdict: A Beautiful, Flawed Dream

After diving into the mechanics and the chemistry, the mystery of the polarized reviews starts to clear up. The Kodak Verite Craft 6 wasn’t a simple appliance; it was a sensitive instrument. It wasn’t a toaster; it was a laboratory-grade tool wrapped in a consumer-friendly shell.

The five-star successes likely came from users who, by luck or careful management, fed it the exact materials it was calibrated for. They used clean, dry, uniformly thick materials that played nicely with the printer’s mechanical tolerances and the ink’s chemical properties.

The one-star failures were probably victims of reality. The real world is messy. A piece of craft wood isn’t perfectly flat. Leather has natural oils. The humidity in your workshop changes. This machine, with its tight tolerances, had little patience for such imperfections. The very ambition that made it so exciting also made it fragile. It was a bridge to a new world of creating, but it was a bridge with a very narrow footpath.

In the end, I don’t see this printer as a failure. I see it as a glorious failure. It’s a fascinating fossil from a specific era in the evolution of desktop manufacturing. It existed in that twilight period before affordable 3D printers truly took over, representing a bold attempt to push the boundaries of what 2D printing could be. It asked the question, “What if we could print on anything?”

For us makers, tinkerers, and creators, tools like the Kodak Verite Craft 6 are more than just functional objects. They are conversation starters. They are puzzles to be solved. They remind us that innovation is often messy and imperfect. The path to the future is littered with these beautiful, flawed dreams, and exploring them is what the maker spirit is all about. The goal isn’t always to find a tool that works perfectly, but to understand the science of why it does—or why it doesn’t. And that, to me, is a five-star discovery.