HP Introduces Photo Kiosks
Just as big name office stores are introducing refilling stations, HP announced yesterday that they are installing self-service photo kiosks into Albertsons supermarkets and Longs Drugs Stores.
The kiosks will work in conjunction with the HP’s Snapfish with the idea being that customers will upload their photos at home and then come to the store to print them out. The main feature will be printing 4×6s, but the kiosks (with the help of an employee) can do other things with the pictures like make calendars or CDs.
There is no mention of prices and the article notes that this could be a tough market for HP to enter. This is because it is currently dominated by Kodak and Fuji and it could take some time to build up trust among customers. Apparently HP sees this as another revenue stream, although it is one that seems to cater to a different market than they usually deal with it. After all, they are trying to make money off of people who didn’t want to print their pictures at home on an HP printer in the first place. I guess they think if they didn’t capture them the first time around then these kiosks are a second chance.
HP charges into retail photo printing market [Reuters]
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February 24th, 2006 at 7:53 pm
HP photo kiosk
This is a potential repeat of their failed Kodak/HP venture this time by HP- the past project “Phogenix” using same ink technology,it was too slow at 250 prints per hr,plus hype about sales of up to $1bn annually,Phogenix failed because it was poorly received by the market and print cost was over the moon,talk about trying to rewrite history,there famous brand doesn’t relate to the digital kiosk retail space,plus digital camera owners are brand loyal,the Canon guy is not going to insert his media into HP,or either is the Kodak owner,same with Nikon,so they have less than 5% of the digital camera market.
With a HP/Kodak kiosk venture, they spent millions of dollars, built a new plant-went to market with poor response to these kiosks then shut it down before they where delivered to handful of customers, saying they where in the “wrong space”-and home printing was where they should be–expect this is panic move to shore up sliding home printing.
Ink jet in the public space just is not good enough quality at a retail level–it has lots of problems with getting the right mix of colours on prints-and with paper having to absorbed the ink at high speed-there will be issues and un happy customers, let alone archival quality of about 20-30yrs these prints begin to fade within 2yrs, our 100yrs archival values at pxidigital®, we offer customers “instant gratification”® expect our customer turn around time will be 2-3 times faster than the HP kiosk, with superior quality digital prints, just spent 14mths retail testing with fantastic customer responses most say we are way in front of the Kodak on demand kiosk quality,we launch is 2 weeks with 2.9 sces per print,having a deal in place before launch for some 35,000 of our kiosks in China over next 5yrs
We went down the path of inkjet 3.5yrs ago when we first started our R&D with Epson as engine supplier,they have in my view equal IP to HP, after retail testing we dropped this inkjet technology,there where too many customer issues with print quality-plus archival issues with inkjet.
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