poetry cam batch 2: now half the price
We’re excited to release a second batch of Poetry Cameras, available now for $699 $349.
Ships immediately to 30+ countries
Can print in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean — along with any Latin-alphabet language, like English or French or Italian
Made in Shenzhen, China, in collaboration with Seeed Studio, during the MIT Research at Scale residency
Our journey has been unexpected at every step of the way. Here’s how it all came together.
2025 was a year of very high highs and very low lows for Poetry Camera.
We made dozens of custom units for early customers we adored, gave a beloved talk at Config, launched a small-batch preorder in the face of tariffs, got an icon designed by the legendary designer Susan Kare, started a camera redesign that took way too long, tried to raise money to go faster, cancelled fundraising, and were featured in Claude ads across the country.
As the work dragged on and the stakes got higher, Ryan and I realized we needed to part ways as creative collaborators. At our lowest points, we seriously considered shutting it all down and refunding everyone’s preorders — but we couldn’t bear the thought of ending on that note.
So we decided that Evan and I would fulfill the preorders by the end of the year, and Ryan would gracefully bow out. It was daunting to imagine building almost a hundred cameras in a month, with no prior hardware experience and no enclosures produced yet and half-finished firmware hanging over our heads. So — why not rally the community? I opened up the studio space to friends and visitors, called in dozens of favors, and brought in new collaborators on firmware (Jaxter Kim) and enclosure design (Stephen Jiang) and production (Mina Park).
We couldn’t have done it without the support of Adriana Valdez-Young and SVA’s MFA Interaction Design department, who provided studio space for our work; friends old and new who came through our open studio days to help with production, including Alex Lynd, Avi Bagla, Bill Dybas, Connie Liu, Estela Diaz, Gordon Cheng, Harry Isaac, Janelle H, Jay Elias, Jen Liu, JuJu Kim, Kevin Chang, Neal Agrawal, Omar Rizwan, Queenie Wu, Sabina Cabrera, Sami Smith, Sebastian Biedegain, and Shuang Cai who helped us with printing, sorting, cleaning, gluing, assembling, disassembling, fixing, replacing, testing, packing up, and shipping out all the cameras.
We hobbled across the finish line, having done our imperfect best. Happy customers sent us photos of how they used the camera over the holidays — traveling, spending time with family, volunteering with children in India.
It was a relief to be on the other side of shipping. And I headed into the new year thinking, no way can I ever do that again.
While we were producing that batch of cameras in New York, Anthropic released a new world-class AI model, Claude Opus 4.5. (It has since been bested by its successor, Opus 4.6, in February.) Opus 4.5 was much better at coding than previous models and had scored higher than any of Anthropic’s actual human job candidates at their own software engineering interview.
Good news for us. In our packed production schedule, I left just a day at the end to focus on rewriting the backend and adding new features and making an admin dashboard. I even “coded” some features from my phone at the airport. To build the same at the beginning of 2025 would have taken me weeks if not months. It felt a bit unsettling to realize, the coding stuff will be easy. Fixing PCB mistakes and debugging printer jams is what’s hard. As far as I was concerned, software was solved, and AGI was here.
I braced myself for a bonkers 2026.
Evan and I landed in Shenzhen at the beginning of January for MIT’s month-long Research at Scale hardware residency. I had the vague goal of learning more about what it would take to keep going on Poetry Camera. Now that the U.S. tariff chaos had stabilized, maybe it was financially viable to scale up to mass production and set up injection molding. How much time and money would it take? And the bigger question hanging in the air: Am I even up for it? Maybe it was time to just give up and go back to what I knew, software. But that old world was gone too.
So I faffed around as a tourist for a week, cosplaying hardware maker in the world’s electronics capital, taking in the factory tours at Seeed Studio and the electronics markets at Huaqiangbei and the drone food delivery in Talent Park.
Enter a late-night email from Mother London, Anthropic’s ad agency who had brought us in on the Keep Thinking campaign. Could we make up to 75 custom cameras for Anthropic at the Super Bowl? We’d only have 3 weeks to pull together another batch like the one that we had barely pulled off in New York — except this time, we had no supplies and no equipment on hand, but we could tap into the full power of the Shenzhen manufacturing ecosystem.
I’m a sucker for a project with an aggressive deadline that might just barely all come together. And I wanted to learn how the pros in Shenzhen would do what we had just done in New York. Let’s fucking go.
Tune in next time for the story of how we built Batch 2 and what we learned in Shenzhen. (Spoiler alert, it all worked out.)
In the meantime, you can buy a Batch 2 Poetry Camera here:
Thank you for making various languages available! I also hope you add a feature that prints the actual photo with the poem attached underneath. It would be just like writing a memo on a Polaroid picture to remember the moment, because memories of a scene fade so quickly.
I know the camera can't generate poems and print without an internet connection, but can I take photos on the go when offline and print them when back on wifi?