Review: photokina 2010

Versione stampabile

At the last photokina there was a lot of talk about photobooks. This year, the focus was still very much on photobooks. There was optimism amongst many of the manufacturers that, while photobooks hadn’t taken off back in 2008, their time has certainly come now. Cewe estimates that they will have sold more than 4 million of their photobooks by the end of 2010.
 
As such, minilabs connected to ordering photokiosk stations were one of the main features of the event, taken from a self-service perspective. While the hardware of the photokiosks hadn’t changed dramatically on the whole, the innovation seems to have gone into the software side of it, to make applications more intuitive for a better customer experience. There also seemed to be a shift away from traditional silver halide printers to dry technologies like inkjet, partly for environmental reasons and partly for cost reasons.
 
Amongst the photokiosks on show were the following:
 
HP debuted a new dry minilab that could handle a variety of products, including photobooks, greetings cards and double-sided printing, while Kodak launched new software for the simple creation of prints for photo frames of different sizes. Sony demonstrated a new range of dry minilab systems as well as two new kiosks in their compact SnapLab series. Noritsu’s stand featured kiosks from their partner Lucidiom and their own new dry duplex MiniLab. KIS Photo-Me introduced a photokiosk which can create photobooks itself, a new compact wall-mounted kiosk and a new self-service photokiosk for unattended locations. Xerox showed their own photo publishing solutions on Fujifilm’s stand, including two kiosks: one a Xerox photokiosk running software from Xerox and Fujifilm and another a kiosk from Fujifilm UK. Cewe demonstrated, along with their photokiosks for printing photobooks, prototypes of new photokiosks, one of which came with an integrated scanner for digitising analogue prints. Kodak also had a fast scanner for the same purpose, where prints can be simply dropped in and are then scanned through.
 
Another interesting development at this year’s photokina was the presence of Microsoft Surface tables: both Fujifilm and Kodak sported these. While Kodak said they were just using the Surface as a demonstration tool at the exhibition, Fujifilm are looking to work with Microsoft to create a complete horizontal photokiosk solution where people could gather in coffee shops to share pictures and then send them to print.
 
The competition for brand loyalty was clear, with numerous applications aimed at converting customers of a brand’s cameras to customers of their photokiosks. HP have launched new software for editing photos which now comes as standard on their latest computers, while Fujifilm customers are able to flag up images on their camera as they take them and then create a photobook at one of Fujifilm’s kiosks.
 
LC Technology discussed an interesting business proposition for photokiosks with us. LC Technology are a data recovery company that proposes to add value at photokiosks by integrating flash card and USB drive data recovery in photokiosk solutions, giving customers an additional reason to use photokiosks. They believe this could make a real difference in the photokiosk market to drive people to use photokiosks more and thus make them more profitable, driving the ROI. They are currently in talks with a number of manufacturers to see how this could be integrated into the software of next generation photokiosks.