Articles | Online Digital Photo Printing Is a Developing Industry |
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As we walk through the first quarter of 2008, one of the Internet's heading battles this year is over your digital photos. According to Photo-Print-Reviews.com - Snapfish, the Web photo service recently bought by Hewlett-Packard Co., lowered its price last week for printing a 4-by-6-inch photo to 9 cents from 14 cents. This week, Walmart matched the offer, dropping the cost of standard prints ordered through its Web site to 9 cents from 12 cents. It was the second price drop this year for Walmart, which had been charging 19 cents per print just a few months ago. The steep price cuts followed a flurry of recent takeovers in the Web photo industry and escalated a price war that has raged for five years over printing digital photos. Yet they won't likely resolve the major question swirling around digital photography: Namely, who's going to make money off all those pictures people are snapping with their shiny new digital cameras and camera phones? Will people print digital images as often as they did film? So far that’s not the case. Expert industry analysts say fewer than one in five digital photos gets printed, compared with the vast majority of those taken on film. "Big companies need to be playing in all these areas," said Jill Aldort, analyst with InfoTrends/CapVentures, who projects that camera owners will continue using all three printing methods. While retail's share of digital printing has been growing, it has not caught up as much as home printing, Aldort said. Even though home printing is considerably more expensive than ordering prints online or in stores. After factoring in ink and paper costs, it is estimated that the average cost of a 4-by-6 photo printed at home would be 36 cents, though larger prints can be more economical. That is several times what you'd pay for standard prints using the services of vendors listed at Photo-Print-Reviews.com. Most of the vendors ship out the prints for free – when you order a standard number of prints. Eastman Kodak Co.'s EasyShare Gallery, one of the most popular online photo sites, charges 15 cents for a standard print. Shutterfly asks 29 cents. Photoworks has them on sale for 19 cents, which is similar to what Costco's Web site charges for ordering prints online and picking up an hour later at any local store. Online print orders today account for less than 15 percent of all digital printing, according to most industry estimates. Partly that is because many digital camera users are unfamiliar with Internet photo services, and others have dial-up Internet connections at home that make transmitting large files difficult. It seems ironic that Hewlett-Packard, which makes a ton of money selling ink and has pushed home printing for years, could become the company that triggers big growth in online photo services by buying Snapfish and lowering its printing prices. When Snapfish launched eight years ago, it charged 59 cents for a 4-by-6 print, close to the industry average at that time. But Snapfish President Ben Nelson insisted that Snapfish is still making a profit today charging only 9 cents. Hewlett-Packard is hardly the only big company trying to buy into the online photo business. On the surface, these sites look similar, offering virtual albums for storing, displaying, editing and printing digital photos. But some make money selling paper prints and custom photo gifts, while others are focused on helping people view, share and manipulate their images thereby; showing ads around the same. The CEO of HP Snapfish said - "Growing the online industry and making sure everyone prints more is critical for Hewlett-Packard. And I can tell you flat out that just in the last week, we have seen both the average number of prints per image and prints per order go up at Snapfish." The final big picture is far from developed, but it's nice and refreshing to see a traditional offline printing company taking the lead in promoting the still-young Internet photo industry. - Article by Tom Johnson |