Introduction |
Skip the queues |
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Kiosks aren't kiosks |
The results |
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Worth the full thousand words? |
Proof in the pictures |
Kiosks aren't kiosks
CNET.com.au recently visited five different photographic printing outlets at Melbourne's Westfield Southland shopping centre: Ted's Camera, Kmart, Big W, Southland Camera House, and Harvey Norman. We also visited our local professional printing shop, Jade Studio in suburban Mentone, to get a set of prints produced under the eye of an expert.
Prices ranged across the full spectrum, with Big W matching Harvey Norman's bargain-basement AU$0.15 per print offer. Regular prints at Camera House and Ted's were AU$0.49 each, Jade charges AU$0.60 each, and Kmart's instant thermal prints (more about these later) topped the charts at AU$0.59 each. Barring Kmart's thermal prints, all shops offer discounts as you print more and more prints in a single job.
At each store, we printed eleven digital images selected to give a wide range of tonality, colour and lighting. Images included colour-soaked sunsets, sodium lamp-soaked pictures from the Australian Open, red-eye-ridden indoor happy snaps, full-sun beach shots, a commercial picture of an astronaut in space, and a green-heavy rainy-day picture. Images were taken to each kiosk on a single SD card, then loaded and printed with default settings.
The only exception was the indoor happy-snap, in which we used the kiosk's red-eye removal feature to replace this extremely obvious picture flaw. Curiously, all of the kiosks we tested replaced the red pupils with a mid-tone grey that looked strangely abnormal during the editing process and just passable when printed. If you want convincing red-eye removal, use a program like Paint Shop Pro (which offers dozens of pupil colourings) to do the job properly before you head to the shops.
Three of the outlets (Harvey Norman, Camera House and Jade) were using Fuji kiosks, while two (Kmart and Ted's) were running Kodak Picture Maker 5.0 software. Big W was using kiosks from once-giant German photographic maker Agfa, although that company's ongoing demise means Agfa kiosks will likely disappear or be renamed in the near future.
In our experiments, the Kodak kiosks had by far the best user interface. Screen quality was bright and clear, making it easy to select pictures to print from a preview. The Kodak and Agfa kiosks loaded thumbnails quickly and only copied over the images it needed to print after they were selected and edited -- making the whole process far quicker; by comparison, the Fuji kiosks wanted to copy all of the 150-plus images from the SD card to their hard drives before allowing our 11 test images to be selected and edited.
The kiosk software can clearly be heavily customised by shop owners, since all three Fuji displays offered a different sequence of options, not all of which added value to the experience and many of which made the process of selecting and editing the pictures less than intuitive. Some kiosks, for example, allowed us to select glossy or matte prints, while others skipped this option and left it up to the operator. Overall, the Kodak software was by far the most intuitive, although the Agfa kiosk deserves commendation for its capable, if less polished, interface. Camera House's Fuji kiosk, in particular, seemed to drag on and on by asking too many questions.
All three kiosks offered similar features, such as the ability to easily select quantities and sizes of prints; basic editing such as red-eye and cropping (which, incidentally, is important to check carefully as aspect ratio differences mean most digital prints will be cropped when printed); and fancy effects such as adding text captions and making calendars and cards.
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barrie harrop
11/11/2006 08:42 PM
Try Kodak kiosk killer coming to Aust www.pxidigital.com
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Sue Taffel
25/02/2007 06:24 PM
Bravo! This is obviously a larger version of something I discovered last year. Such a shame about the Agfa machine. It was by far the best value for money and quality. Here's a curly question: all machines add brown, presumably for 'richness'. How can I compensate for this so that grey stays grey?
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tommie
14/10/2007 09:43 AM
Photo kiosks over 75,000 hits on our web site fro www.pxidigital.com sue we can fix your problem at pxi.
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Hammer11
29/10/2007 09:26 AM
You comment about inks at the end of the piece which is funny because photolabs do not print your regular 4x6 on anything except true light sensitive photographic paper. The only difference is the exposure is done by laser rather than a lamp like anologue machines used to
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stuart
16/03/2008 12:07 PM
there was no comments on what format the photos are required to be in? ie do they need to be in jpg, tiff, bmp etc?
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