Print photos at home?

I’ve recently saw a TV commercial for a new Epson photo printer called PictureMate. The printer is shown printing off some really nice photographs from the digtal camera connected directly to it. At first, I thought it was pretty neat because it was small and the website examples look impressive. The thing that changed my mind was the estimated cost per print.

The estimated cost per print (4×6) for this printer is $0.29. Fairly cheap, especially compared to what it used to cost, but it’s higher than what I can get from Wal-Mart or Walgreens. I’m not sure what Walgreens is dropping their price to but Wal-Mart has dropped their digital photo development price from $0.29 to $0.19/photo for one-hour processing ($0.12 for standard 2-3 day). That means I would save approximately $2 for 20 prints if I sent them to Wal-Mart versus printing them on the PictureMate. That’s after breaking even on the initial cost of the PictureMate.

Wal-Mart has recently revamped their photo development website and I must say it is very nice. I had some shots on my digital camera I wanted developed so I went to Wal-Mart’s photo site and logged into my account. From there, I was able to upload my pictures and store them in an online photo album. You can upload up to 200 MB at a time in JPG or TIFF format, max. 6MB per photo.

The nice thing is that I have the choice of which store they are printed to, if I want to pick them up at the store or have the shipped to me and also if I want to pay at the store, pay online with a gift card or pay with a credit/debit card. This is very handy if you want to just prepay so you can zip in, pick up your pics and zip out.

Another nice feature is when you get to the part of actually ordering the prints, it will give you a selection of all the sizes (4×6, 5×7, 8×10, package deals, etc.) and tell you if the size of the print is suggested or not. A few of my pics were shot at 640×480 so it had a green check, and the word “Suggested”, next to the wallet size and a red check next to all the other sizes. The shots I had at higher resolutions had green checks next to all of the sizes (5.1 MB camera).

For those of us not savvy enough to edit our digital photographs in programs like Adobe Photoshop or The Gimp, both Walgreens and Wal-Mart online offers simple photo-manipulation tools. The tools are the basic crop, rotate, color adjustment, red-eye reduction and adding some stock borders. Good enough for removing Aunt Gladys from the family reunion.

The decision to print my own pictures at home versus printing my digital shots on high quality store photo printers at a low price is a pretty easy one for me. Until they can really go rock bottom on home photo printing cost, it’s going to be a pretty hard market to break into except for those not close to a Walgreens or Wal-Mart (is there such a place?). I’m sure Target will eventually offer the ability to upload digital photographs to them to be printed at their store.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. -Albert Einstein

13.Jun.05 Technology