Review: Photokina 2008

Version imprimable

Meandering around Photokina this year, it was hard to miss the huge range of photo kiosks now on offer, including Fujifilm’s Photo Terminal, Kodak’s Picture Kiosks, Noritsu’s Consumer Terminals, Mitsubishi’s easyphoto solution, KIS Photo-Me’s Creative Kiosks, FotoToGo’s Terminals, Tiger Kiosks, Oblo’s Kioskline, and HP and Sony’s range, to name but a few.
 
There were many table top kiosks on display, like those of the KIS Photo-Me group and Noritsu, where several kiosks were networked and connected to one central printer or minilab for instant printing in various shapes and sizes. The photokiosk market certainly seems to have oriented itself towards retailers to provide compact self-service terminals which can be installed in any high street store. The development and printing of photos has now become a vending transaction which can take place in a few seconds while you are in the middle of doing your other shopping. Most of the photo kiosks offered a ticket receipt which could be paid for at a counter, but Kodak and a few others like Alimpix offered a pay-as-you-go top-up card loyalty system. Almost all of the photokiosks allowed people to play with their photos by adding frames, creating albums, removing red-eye, making photos black-and-white, adding text, changing the colour contrast or simply burning to CD to fiddle with on a computer at home later. A diverse range of storage media are now accepted, including memory cards, memory sticks, USB sticks, Bluetooth and even wireless.

Whatever else was evident at Photokina, two things were certain: one, that digitalisation has certainly not put people off printing; and two, that photokiosks are going to become a ever more common occurrence, particularly in retail environments, all across Europe.