The Workings of a KODAK Picture Maker

by t_ratv

You must have seen these things around.  If you have been unfortunate enough to have to work on them, I pity you.

I have had that experience and so I'm writing a little guide to illustrate how they work.  The usual disclaimer exists.  This is for informational purposes only.  You can be in violation of laws.  I gained this experience from working at a place that dealt with these abominations.

First off, we need to cover the different machines out in the wild, so to say.

There are three major generational shifts.  The first generation of Picture Makers was based on a very proprietary Sun system using a SPARC processor.  The only thing that can be easily changed out is the RAM.  It seems to be the only thing that can be upgraded too.  You can still run into these machines and they have the most limitations on them.  They have a PCMCIA card reader which is very limited on what it can take, SD cards only up to maybe 64 MB, and they all have to be used with an adapter.  The peripherals are either SCSI or a proprietary KODAK connection.  The scanner is a rebadged Epson.

The second generation of machines is called the PS4.  Still based off of Sun Microsystems, these have a little more flexibility as far as hardware goes but not much.  Faster and newer, it's still very proprietary and a pain to work on.  It still relies on the SCSI bus, but has an internal card reader.  The scanner is a rebranded Epson again.

The current generation of machines is called the G3 or third generation.  These machines made the huge jump of running a Windows OS (either 2000 or XP Pro).  These machines typically will be running a Pentium 4 processor in a machine that was built for KODAK by IBM.

The scanners are once again Epsons, but they cripple them by not allowing the ability to scan in the negatives or slides.  This time the scanners and printers are USB and parallel.  These machines are the newest and have been around in some shape or form for about four years.  Some have a touch screen CRT.  The newer ones have a touch screen LCD.  The G3s also have a fully functional and practical card reader as well as Bluetooth and infrared capabilities.

That covers the hardware.  Now to get into the fun part: the picture maker software.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to just talk about one of the major holes and another way of gaining raw access to the hard drive on the G3 machines.

All Picture Makers have the same "feature" built in.  Right after the machine boots up, one can go into the setup menu without entering any type of password until the screensaver plays (you can tell when that is because it will say "Welcome to Kodak Picture Maker").  Once there, you can see the current password, change it to whatever, play with pricing, and run many other diagnostics.

What becomes interesting is when you are on a G3 Picture Maker, there is an icon for setting the IP address.  What that does is pop you into the traditional Windows Network configuration mode.

From there you have access to anything on the hard drive and you can change any number of settings.  It really is an easy system to get through.

The other issue with this is that as a technician, you have to resort to these measures to get these machines to operate properly on a network with a lab.

KODAK didn't bother to tell the technicians that before either.  It is a really sad state of affairs.

Just in case any of you gets stuck working on one of these things, you now have an idea on how to get around and make it viable.