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June 02, 2005
[ The fight for your memories ]
Epson Australia executive Mike Pleasants began to appreciate the dimensions of the battle that his company was engaged in when he walked past a Big W department store and saw it was advertising 6 x 4 digital prints at 20 cents apiece.
A few years ago, they would have cost $3.95. Even a year ago, they were commonly around the $1.30 mark, which made products such as Epson's PictureMate 6 x 4 printer, capable of churning out prints at about 50 cents each, highly competitive. Now, Mr Pleasants and his counterparts at Canon and HP are feeling the pressure.
The new price point for the 6 x 4 segment, which represents more than 90 per cent of all photographic printing, reflects an explosion in the multimillion-dollar digital imaging marketplace and a move by retailers such as Big W, Kmart and Harvey Norman to wrest market share from inkjet printer manufacturers such as Epson and Canon, along with specialist photographic retailers and suburban photo labs.
According to the Photographic Marketing Association of Australia, the department stores and traditional photographic outlets are making considerable gains, largely because of a rapid escalation in the installation of digital photographic kiosks and marketing dollars.
US figures - which the local industry claims are, if anything, slightly behind Australian trends - show that in the 12 months to March, the percentage of total print output generated from inkjet printers dropped from 70.5 per cent to 50.4 per cent.
The printer companies still enjoyed substantial growth, however, because the number of prints from their products was up 18 per cent.
Association executive director Terry Rimmer says the number of digital kiosks in Australia has jumped from about 600 a year ago to more than 3000.
The trend marks a massive turnaround for the traditional photographic print industry, which even a year ago was facing a disturbing future, because digital camera buyers were largely business-oriented males.
"They weren't printing their images," Mr Rimmer says. "They were sharing images by email or on computer screens. That started to change as the decline in the average camera price made it more of a consumer item, bringing women into the market, and the rapid uptake of digital labs and kiosks started to bring printing costs down."
At Epson, the response has been to cut prices. At some stores, consumers can now pick up a pack of six inkjet cartridges and 100 sheets of 6 x 4 paper for the company's popular PictureMate printer for less than $40.
According to founder and director of Wilheml Imaging Research, Henry Wilhelm, the PictureMate has revolutionised photographic printing, producing the most stable print that an amateur has ever had access to. It uses six colour pigment inks, which his research says, will last 104 years - many times longer than the output of photo-lab prints.
Posted by cw at June 2, 2005 06:54 PM
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Comments
Where can you 'pick up a pack of six inkjet cartridges and 100 sheets of 6 x 4 paper for the company's popular PictureMate printer for less than $40." in Melbourne? - at 40c per print equivalent it finally makes sense for me where it didn't at $1 per print, given the Fuji Frontier labs printing at about 50c per print at higher volumes
Posted by: dan at June 3, 2005 07:39 AM