Photofinishing and Book Creation : Finisher’s Corner: Minilab Trends: Success Is Tied to Selling the Retail Experience

Not too long ago, a friend who is a longtime salesperson for minilab equipment needed to get some prints made from images of his newborn grandson that were taken on his iPhone. So he called a few retail locations near his home to see whether he could e-mail the images and come down to pick up the prints. He was told no, he needed to actually come into the shop for this task.

At the first retailer, the store associate had to find a cable to connect the iPhone before he could try to download the images, and then the system would not load them because there were too many of them. While this was happening, my friend had to continuously ask questions to make everything happen. At a different store, recently installed software was unable to recognize the image format, and my friend sadly concluded that a typical consumer would never have made it as far as getting prints.

What can we deduce from this anecdote? We know that the number of images being captured on cameraphones/smartphones is increasing far more rapidly than those being taken on digital still cameras (DSC). In fact, we estimated that in 2011 the number of images saved (not taken) worldwide by DSCs reached 147 billion, while those taken and saved with cameraphones reached 76 billion. We project that by 2015 the number of images saved from DSCs will grow to 156 billion, and those saved from cameraphones will reach 143 billion. Obviously, a key for those operating minilabs, and kiosks, is to be able to print from cameraphone images.

Ron Kubara, who serves as an international proselytizer for Noritsu (noritsu.com), presented exciting programs at two conferences we organized during 2011 that unquestioningly demonstrated the ability of today’s minilabs, with the appropriate software applications, to make outstanding enlargements from relatively low-resolution cameraphone images. Still, the worldwide minilab market has been affected by a combination of lack of marketing skills by operators, an unawareness by consumers of the printing capabilities for a wide range of personalized photo products, floundering economies and a difficult year of natural disasters as well as civil wars. The impact on sales is shown in Figure 1.

Although there have been no sales of double-sided silver halide minilabs in North America due to the unavailability of the necessary photographic paper in this region, sales have been quite strong in China, Africa and Southeast Asia. Besides four Chinese manufacturers currently manufacturing these systems, led by Prismlab (prismlab.com) which pioneered this technology, one European minilab company has started selling its own version and another may also join the competition. These minilabs are getting faster and outperform comparable inkjet minilabs.

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