One, we're a small team that is just starting to scale up production, so we want to maintain quality while staying nimble. Two, the current Trump tariffs have made it almost impossible for small businesses to plan large-scale, long-term manufacturing. We wanted to turn a challenge into an opportunity — what can we do that's special at smaller quantities?

The Limited Edition uses different plastics manufacturing methods suitable for low-volume production — likely 3D printing, though we are also evaluating other options depending on order quantity. The Limited Edition may also have different interior components than a mass-produced camera, as components often need to be changed to accommodate lower price points and scale.

Limited Edition customers will be invited to join our Discord community to share their experiences and give feedback. If you want to learn a bit about how electronics are made, get a peek behind the curtain of product development, and help shape the future of Poetry Camera — come along for the ride!

Stay tuned on our newsletter as we develop the Limited Edition and explore a future wide release.

Nope! Poetry Camera will never require a subscription to use.

Yup! First, the camera has a knob on it that lets you switch the modes of what it prints. It comes with defaults like "haiku" and "sonnet."

Next, you can customize these camera modes to print anything based on the photo you take, by fiddling with the camera settings on your phone or computer. This is where you can get weird! Ask the camera to write from the perspective of a bee, or print postmodern receipts, or instill it with some sense of self-awareness...

Currently, the camera can print in any language that uses the Latin alphabet — including Spanish, French, and more. We're working on supporting non-Latin languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic.

We're definitely interested in experimenting with printing images... this is exactly the type of feature that will be shaped by customer feedback!

The camera never prints the original picture! It feels more magical that way, and reduces the pressure of trying to look good posing for photos.

The original photo is never saved or stored anywhere, for maximum data privacy. We don't want to be in the business of storing your data.

We never train any AI models on your photos, and we take care to use AI model providers that don't train on your data.

To be honest, it could be useful for the camera owner to be able to access the original photos if they wanted, especially if you're using the camera for special events. We look forward to hearing the community's feedback and iterating to find a useful solution that still respects your privacy.

Nope! We don't train any AI models ourselves, and we take care to pick reputable AI model providers that do not train on your data.

We also collect as little data as possible from you because frankly, we don't want to know!

Currently not — the camera needs wifi to work. We're looking forward to testing how an "offline mode" could work, guided by community feedback.

It's a bit like asking "Can cameras make art?" On their own? No. But in the hands of the right person? Certainly.

Poetry Camera started as an art project to explore new ways of seeing and remembering the moment.

To us, Poetry Camera is not fully photography, is not fully poetry, but a weird new third thing enabled by new technology.

While we don't see the poems themselves as art, we see them as ingredients and materials in a new art form. We humans are used to thinking of poems (or paintings, or novels) as the end result of a laborious creative process. Generative models can create infinitely many words and images in an instant, which gives us the opportunity to use poems (or images) as intermediaries in a new type of creative process. What then becomes the end result? What are we putting our effort into creating?

Yes! We have an open-source version that uses Raspberry Pi. It's a good weekend project to get started with learning hobby electronics! See what our community has made with it!

We are educators who care deeply about making technology and art accessible to anyone who wants to learn. We've also run Build-Your-Own-Poetry-Camera workshops as a workshop at art and design schools like RISD and SVA. Please contact us if you are interested in seeing those materials and would like to help open-source them!