The UK Photokiosk Market

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Meeting the Specific Needs of the UK Photo Kiosk Market

An interesting point to dazzle your friends with next time supper conversation begins to lag: Ireland has the highest per capita usage of photo kiosks in the world! The Irish are closely followed by the Australians, who then leave the rest of the world looking positively monochrome. You learn this within five minutes of meeting Simon Mollison of NeoProducts, and it’s that level of retained detail that makes him the first man to quiz when it comes to the latest developments and applications in the world of photo kiosks – he has a memory that Kodak, Fuji or Konica would truly be happy to patent!
 
Software Group Manager Mollison is sector-savvy and, together with technical partner Display Solutions, has driven the first volume production of panel PC photo kiosks for one of the UK’s photographic giants. It’s a groundbreaking solution which combines reliability, serviceability and longevity with an audacious price point. Pop into your local supermarket or high-street chemist and there’s a high chance that their photo kiosk will have been designed and manufactured by the NeoProducts team with a Display Solutions panel PC driving it. Birmingham-based NeoProducts has been supplying kiosk solutions for the global market for over twenty years, having revolutionised the job-seekers experience in government employment centres first in Australia and then in the UK – even receiving a DTi Award for its contribution.
 
Mollison’s knowledge is fired by ambition for his company – after all, you don’t relocate to the UK from Australia to contemplate average: “The digital photographic market has been a really interesting example of how major players took a long, long time to adjust to a radically changing market,” he begins. “When digital cameras first came in, the big photographic companies just put their head in their hands and virtually gave up – in fact globally we lost a lot of big names. On the one hand. you could say ‘who can blame them?’ After all, their tried and tested business model of selling 35mm cameras and the associated film, then developing and processing the prints was disappearing before their very eyes. What they were reluctant to see, however, was that whereas once people only took their cameras along on special occasions – for example, birthdays and holidays, now these same people were taking photographs practically every day of their lives! The market was actually expanding faster than anyone could have predicted, and for these companies to survive it needed a bit of lateral thinking to see how these new photographers could be best served. Cue the digital photo kiosk, where people can select, manipulate and print their own selection of pictures. Interestingly, it’s a model that is being replicated in both the music and movie industries, both of which we are also involved with.”
 
“Of course, there were, and still are, challenges to overcome, as not everyone saves their photographic data in the same way, but we can easily adapt our hardware to cope with the differing formats. We started out, for example, offering four hubs which accepted four different types of media, now our standard models are fitted with eight – which covers most current formats from mini disc through CD, USB stick, and so on.”
 
A Little Brit Different
 
While Ireland and Australia battle it out for the heavyweight photo-taking title, the UK market’s demands have posed Mollison a special challenge. With his customers very clear in their requirements, it was apparent that a new configuration was necessary to satisfy cost constraints.
 
“The UK market is substantially different to mainland Europe,” he explains. “Over in Europe people want to take their USB sticks to kiosks that upload their pictures to a large processing warehouse, from where they are then dispatched to their home address. Here in the UK, we want either instant prints or a mini-lab where you upload the pictures you want and then return in an hour or so to pick them up, so that wholesale warehouse model is a very small part of the market.” Essentially, the photo kiosks for both are identical, with the instant print variable merely needing an integral printer, which in terms of kiosk design doesn’t raise many eyebrows, particularly within the ranks of NeoPro, but what Mollison was seeking was a cost-effective, reliable solution that would be easy to service and fully adaptable. “As a company we don’t tend to use distributors – we already have our own in-house departments, so why incur the extra cost? But speccing the heads for this project was particularly challenging and when we had initial talks with Display Solutions it seemed the right way to go.”
 
Cheng Yoe is Managing Director of Display Solutions, the company responsible for supplying the panel PC units at the heart of the photo kiosks. “We have partners in Taiwan who we have collaborated with on many projects over the years, and I knew that by combining our design team with their engineers we could produce the optimum solution that would give performance, reliability and value for money,” said Yoe.
 
For Mollison, prior to meeting Huntingdon-based Display Solutions, there were times when the ideal solution seemed almost unattainable. “I knew we were asking for a lot: a panel PC with laptop performance and advanced technical specification. We needed heaps of processing power to offer the level of RAM needed to allow people to upload all their photos and to handle that level of data. I also wanted what was essentially an off-the-shelf solution, because I wanted all the bugs ironed out of any system, as well as continuity of supply. But Display Solutions offered the ability, knowledge and willingness to work as a partnership to get the right result, and that gave us the ideal solution with the panel PC we wanted.”
 
For any photo kiosk, downtime directly affects profits: “I think it would be naive for anyone to expect zero failures, it is more realistic to offer a unit that is quick and easy to service – after all, not only is the kiosk out of action but any technician’s time is costly! Our kiosks are single key entry, with removable and easily changeable hard-drives – vital for the mini-lab market where configuring different paper specs can take ages – the panel pc is removable without tools, and all of our parts are quick to change, which means that when a problem does occur, it can be fixed in a matter of minutes – in fact our average service call is under three minutes.”
 
Martin Whitehead is Systems Manager at Display Solutions and explains the technical challenges they faced: “Our goal was to design to NeoProducts’ brief for their kiosks, which included a need to meet restricted space requirements. We combined the availability and reliability of the production line with the flexibility of a bespoke unit. By advising on every aspect of the interior technology, from which touch screen to adopt through to which chip-sets, we were able to retain complete control and deliver the solution we knew could satisfy all demands.”
 
Meanwhile, if your fellow diners (presumably those within the self-service industry, unless you want to get seated next to the expert in 1976 Ford gearbox variants at the next meal - Ed) are hungry for more nuggets about photographic life Aussie-style, leave them with this to ponder: while here in the UK we’d be lucky to find anywhere with more than six digital kiosks within the same retail outlet, those Australians can expect anything up to 22 units – and there will still be queues to use those. It seems that Down Under you just can’t capture enough magic moments.