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Spilling More Ink in The Digital Realm
Forget
the printer wars. Ink is the new blood sport in the printing market,
thanks to the budding growth of digital photo prints.Get ready for
users and vendors to spill more of it, with smiles all around.In a
consumer and business world utterly saturated with printers that do
everything but take out the cat, a new niche is starting to emerge: The
single-function photo printer, typically printing snapshot-size photos
on glossy paper.In addition, more and more multi-function printers that
copy, fax and scan are now shipping with all kinds of memory readers
for photos.Printer makers, feeling the pinch of dropping prices for
printers, are looking to build back their margins on ink sales.
Printing digital photos is in that sweet spot.Looks like consumers are
in the mood to oblige, too. We’re seeing a subtle shift among digital
camera owners to print more images beyond the usual pack of early
adopters. It’s easy to see why.Seems that no matter how much digital
photography has reshaped the old guard of the photography industry, our
connection to printing and publishing images dear to us is too strong
to snap off after a few years of digital device adoption.Viewing them
on a device is one thing. Holding a glossy, sticking it on your fridge,
framing it, slapping it on your t-shirt – the ease of that from a
digital file is the next growth phase to watch.That’s not to say photo
printing has ramped up with the explosion of digital camera adoption.
Far from it.Printer sales in the consumer realm are overall still
fairly flat, according to IDC, as well as InfoTrends, which tracks
consumer behavior with digital photo and merchandise.But
single-function photo printing is spreading, along with sales of
multi-function inkjets that cover this category, mostly in the
direction of retail outlets, notes Sandra Collins, senior consultant
with research firm InfoTrends. She’s projecting about a 124 percent
growth in photo-centric printers between this year and next.”More
people are buying cameras, but that doesn’t mean people are printing
more,” she cautions. After all, folks are also enjoying the freedom of
choosing what not to print from their digital troves.Plus, a larger
chunk of the photo-printing volume is flowing to retail kiosks, for
example. It’s a perfect outlet for busy moms: drop the photo disk at a
drug store’s printing area, pick out more diapers.Still, InfoTrends
reckons that the retail value of all inkjet cartridges for desktop-type
inkjet printers was $13.5 billion in the U.S. alone (that’s a different
ink category than retail kiosks). This year, it expects that number to
rise to $15.1 billion, up by 11.8 percent, according to InfoTrends’
John Shane.Wouldn’t you think that the younger generation, which never
experienced analogs like vinyl records, would be pooh-poohing printing?
After all, why print when you can share your images on a Web site and
create a digital equivalent of a scrapbook?InfoTrends’ data suggests
otherwise. Turns out the 18-to-24 age group is the most likely to
print, as well as those 25 to 34 years old. And they capture more
images too, between 141 and 143 every three months.On average though,
the firm found that about 67 percent of people print most often at
home. And probably about 37 percent of that group (digital camera
owners who print) in multiple locations.Keith Kmetz, hardcopy research
analyst for IDC, is seeing a lot of blurring in the printer area
because of the emerging printing trends from digital images.”We’re even
seeing color laser devices incorporating photo slots,” he says, as well
as general inkjet devices challenging the photo-centric printers
hitting the consumer market.It’s just a different kind of
photo-printing dynamic at play now. People are sharing their photos
online, and perhaps printing from those sites, such as HP’s
Snapfish.com.It’s not explosive growth, but it’s enough to give
printers heart and give camera owners a new sense of ownership and
creativity about how they use those digital files.All the major printer
players are adding these slots to their printers, with visions of more
ink cartridges spilling into their margins.Lexmark , for example,
recently introduced a 450 Series printer that does 4 x 6 glossies in
lots of different incarnations: photos, scrapbook features, greeting
cards, index cards.It’s also the first photo-centric printer that lets
you burn CDs as well as read from one. So not only is the company
targeting folks fed up with using their computers for simple image
printing, but it’s also addressing the backup and security for those
precious images.I played around with the 450 and found myself
delightfully surprised with the ease of use and how it fueled my
creative juices.Although the quick-start guide was utterly out of synch
with the LCD readout explaining how to get started, it’s intuitive
enough and similar in menu format to most cell phones and kiosks that
getting to print was easy enough with some hacking around.The main menu
could use a little less tunneling to get to cropping, red-eye and other
retouching features. But my frustrations melted away once the stunning
images from my 8 Megapixel camera rolled off the printer.In a snap, I
had joined the growing numbers of digital camera owners reconnecting
with that tactile pleasure of holding a photo image in their hands,
sticking it on a fridge, or framing it for display.Truckloads of
photo-focused printers are already rumbling into the market, at
pricepoints of about $200 or so, and more are on the way this
fall.They’re carrying with them a real one-demand printing world, an
ability to connect with our images the old-fashioned way, and new
avenues of creativity with digital images. Let the ink spill.
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