News

Invasion of the photo kiosks

May 11, 2004

SEATTLE-There's no need to purchase an expensive printer if you want photo-quality prints from your digital camera, according to an article on Forbes.com.

In the article, reporter Stephen Manes shared his photo kiosk experiences as he sampled kiosk quality at several Seattle-area Walgreens. Manes said that the experience wasn't perfect, but it was a whole lot better than he expected.

The first kiosk he tried was a Fujifilm Aladdin. His 11 pictures emerged in less than five minutes, but the prints had strange contrast with occasional odd color rendition.  Manes claimed that this was due to the thermal ink method, which he claims is visibly inferior to the traditional silver-halide process.

At another Walgreens, there was an Aladdin hooked up to one of Fuji's big one-hour-photo Frontier minilabs, which delivered traditional prints that looked excellent. Walgreens charges 29 cents per 4-by-6 print, either thermal or traditional.

While Kodak's Picture Maker kiosks started out as scanner-only, many now accept memory cards. Unfortunately, the first one Manes tried repeatedly delivered a Windows error message when he inserted his memory card. The culprit turned out to be a bent pin in the machine's compact flash slot.

Many Kodak kiosks put three 4-by-6 prints on one page, which costs the same as an 8-by-10.  The drawback is that you have to cut it apart yourself. Kodak says its newer models can produce 4-by-6 thermal prints or use its minilabs to produce true photo prints at prices competitive with Fuji.
 
Manes suggests making a call to the store first, if it is not close by.  At three of the stores he tried, one Kodak had a broken card reader, one hadn't been upgraded to handle memory cards, and one Fuji was out of commission.