Prints and other 'wasteful purchases'

The Internet Allows<br>

Consumers to Trim<br>

Wasteful Purchases<br>

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By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY<br>

November 29, 2006; Page B1<br>

The Wall Street Journal<p>

 

Photography and publishing companies shouldn't be surprised when digital

technology upends their industries. After all, their business success relied on

forcing customers to buy things they didn't want.<p>

 

Photo companies made customers pay for 24 shots in a roll of film to get a

handful of good pictures. Music publishers made customers buy full CDs to get a

single hit song. Encyclopedia publishers made parents spend thousands of dollars

on multiple volumes when all they wanted was to help their kid do one homework

paper. The business models required customers to pay for detritus to get the

good stuff.<p>

 

Inevitably, their industry revenues are shrinking now that consumers can use

digital technology and the Internet to select only what they want.

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[ . . . ]

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Frank Baillergeon, an Eagle, Idaho, photo-industry consultant, says prints will

never come back in fashion because people prefer digital images directly

implanted on coffee cups, photo books, personal calendars and the like. Kodak is

scrambling to find new revenue sources in the digital era.

<p>

Music buyers have made a similar conversion...

"...Photo companies made customers pay for 24 shots in a roll of film to get a handful of good pictures. Music publishers made customers buy full CDs to get a single hit song..."

 

What a silly comparison. The number of shots on a roll is irrelevant, the number of keepers is subject to one's "success rate". Theoretically one can have 24 keepers on a roll of 24. With CDs it's called "Best of..." compilations. So what?

 

Further. I don't believe "digital technology" is changing the nature of people. Before we had people shooting slides - "no prints!" Now we have digital enthusiasts shooting thousands of worthless junk images per day. I can't stand mindless slogans like "information highway!", "digital revolution"", "baby boomers vs Gen Y-ers!" - utter nonsense.

 

"...Frank Baillergeon, an Eagle, Idaho, photo-industry consultant, says prints will never come back in fashion because people prefer digital images directly implanted on coffee cups..."

 

Coffer cups my ^%@! Prints have never got out of fashion and never will.

Well I think its a point well made. There is the means today for people to be selective about what they buy rather than clutter themselves with bloated packages. If I want a single track from a CD then I can and do buy it. My family make thousands of digital images which they are mostly content to view on screen, share via email or CD. The number of photographs they make has gone up but the number of prints coming into the house has fallen dramatically- which is just as well given the requirement to store them and then just possibly find them again afterwards (fat chance). Its much easier to store and catalogue a hard drive or CD. When they do want prints they'll make a CD of their selection and take it to a Frontier shop.

 

Now nothing particularly new and earth-shattering here I know, but the point this guy's making is that organisations have been set up and costed on the basis of the bloated sale model. Unless they adapt to a world where lots of their customers buy the rights to play a single track -and print maybe 5% of the photographs they take- then there's going to be some fallout here. And indeed maybe there needs to be fallout.

 

As I say. a point well made, if not an entirely new one.

My grandma this year asked for photo prints for christmas this year. Since digital took off she stated, she has nothing new in her albums. The everyday person doesn't print as much, but the artists continue. I rather like being selective about printing. Even with film, I'd get developing and contact sheets whenever available and THen select what to print. I hated stacks and stacks of 4x5s laying around. It was such a waste of paper.

Quote: "Photo companies made customers pay for 24 shots in a roll of film to get a handful of good pictures."

 

Oh yeah, the consumer was dragged kicking and screaming to roll film from sheet film, not!

 

Quote: "...prints will never come back in fashion because people prefer digital images directly implanted on coffee cups, photo books, personal calendars and the like."

 

Implanted? Imprinted is a more accurate term. There are more options for prints than ever these days.

 

This is an article about nothing.

<i>Photography and publishing companies shouldn't be surprised when digital technology upends their industries. After all, their business success relied on forcing customers to buy things they didn't want.</i><p>

 

The reason probably has more to do with displacement through technological innovation, just as the Model T FORD, in a span of 8 years was made cheaper to own than to buy a horse and feed it for a year. Then there's the FAX machine displaced by the Internet, transatlantic air travel cutting time from days by steamship to hours. The list goes on. <br><br>

Kodak's core business was made obsolete just as vinyl record pressing plants and mylar recording tape manufacturers; it will have no future if it can not reinvent itself to remain relevant.

My Mom's generation doesn't use computers. I used to get 'double prints' from family functions and then mail her a set. Now I upload my digital files to ofoto.com (or whatever Kodak is calling it these days) and have *them* send her a set of prints. She loves it, it costs pretty much the same as my old film prints cost, and I don't have to package them or make a trip to the post office.

 

I can also use the ofoto site for sharing with distant relatives who are computer savvy.

 

But I still buy music CD's......

You only need to pay attention to what your family and friends are doing to see the truth in this. My sister is a prime example. She bought a kodak easy share printer for her camera last year. She only used it a couple of times. She prefers to have an online service make her prints and she only prints about 5%. The days of dropping off a roll of film for most people is over.

 

Even the lab I use for my MF stuff is increasingly getting more of it's work electronicly.

I forget which photo.net forum it was in, but one photographer also lamented that digital may be moving the "common man" to devalue the photographic image itself. The argument went something like: "Everyone sees all of these wonderful images at art fairs, photo shows, and even filling the picture frames for sale in department stores...and thanks to digital cameras, folks think that they can do just as well themselves."

 

Again, that was just a paraphrase from memory. But one wonders how the rise of digital is affecting the marketplace at the interface where photographers try to sell their work to non-photo-pro buyers?

 

Sincerely,

 

Dave

I studied marketing and come to a controversial conclusion that customers generally don't know what they want. People use what's available to them. With digital, people don't print because they don't have time. They "catalogue" thousands of pics on their HD, CDs or DVDs. They don't even have time to view these pics more than once. Then their HD fails, CDs get lost and they start again - in blind faith they're riding the "information superhighway" (remember this term?)

 

Carefully selected prints sorted lovingly in a family album are so much better for anyone, yet most people are too lazy to spend the time these days

The false premise here is that digital is 'allowing' consumers to be 'more selective', when we can clearly see the opposite is happening.

 

In both photography and music, digital enables consumers to be glutinous horders of meretricious rubbish. I don't need to haul 4 GB of pop songs around with me everywhere I go. I don't need 100,000 (/million) images that I mindlessly snapped sitting on a hard drive that will mercifully fail soonish, or on dvds that may need a few more years to expire. Thank you very much.

 

These things don't lead to a deeper appreciation or understanding of music and photography. If anything, they are thereby devalued and blend seamlessly with the rest of our throwaway, fast food culture

 

Nice try, Spin Doctor...

Just because a few people are hoarders, or that technology permits one to hoard, does not mean that most people do. Surveys repeatedly show that people are keeping keepers -- most people, anyway.

"...people are keeping keepers..."

 

You know what the most difficult part of a photos shoot is? At least to me, it's deleting the deadwood. Most people, faced with this task would fail to separate the good from the ugly. Given the typical success ratio of say, 1 to 5%, the biggest variable bceomes the quantity of images you have in the first place. How many normal people you know what delete 95 to 99% of their images?

that's becuase most people consider themselves to have a higher success rate, in the 50-80%. That's the issue. People are attracted to stuff. Americans LOVE stuff. America consumes more natural resources than anybody for a reason. More and bigger is better. Why wouldn't this apply to photos.

 

People sure do what the market leads them to. Sure artists will love prints for a long time, but most don't print becuase they don't know how easy it is to use an online service and frankly don't want to spend the time. You see the average person goes to work, comes home, eats and watches a bit of tv, maybe excercises and maybe does some sort of activity to try and forget they hate their job.

 

When the only option for even seeing/sharing the outcome of picture taking was going to a lab, there were even 1 hour drive through windows!

 

Now that people see the photo right away they feel less of need to print based off of the simple fact that there is less curiosity. What is it that pushes them to print. Well, it has to be an important enough picture that they want to see it effortlessly or share it with someone without a computer. Otherwise they just put it as their background and email it to their friends or post in on pnet or flickr or myspace or whatever.

My favorite part is the "encyclopedia publishers made parents...etc."

 

Typical "business model" thinking, ignores the fact that a set of encyclopedias MIGHT have value after the one paper is done. That boy needs to shift his paradigm

 

A friend of mine taped parts of albums other people bought, on a reel to reel, from the early sixties

 

I guess part of this guy's point is that I don't have to have a whole roll of film developed and prints made to see one pic: yawn, not news.

 

Maybe he just found out about digital

 

BTW, when I print my own and give them to friends, they seem pleased

<small><i><blockquote>

 

Maybe he just found out about digital

 

</blockquote> </i> </small><p>

 

Maybe you don't know what's been happening in the photography and music marketplace in the last five years.

<small><i><blockquote>

 

Now that people see the photo right away they feel less of need to print based off of the simple fact that there is less curiosity. What is it that pushes them to print.

 

</blockquote> </i> </small><p>

 

Pleanty of curiosity amongst those who email photos, place them on places like Flickr, etc. Even people who grew up with family photo albums, even the elderly, seem to have quickly adjusted -- even prefer -- to have saved fave photos they can easily access and print as will than have shelves filled with books of prints.

Z old sport, I know, point is this guy just found out it looks like

A few months ago I read about a camera made in China which has a Minolta MD mount and is a 6MP DSLR. I have anough Minolta MC anad MD mount lenses that I might want to get one if I could find it. This camera has the same type of cloth horizontal focal plane shutter as the X-700, X-370 etc. The author of the review didn't know whether the cloth shutter would be up to the task of being inside a digital camera. Why? Because people shoot enormous numbers of "frames" with digital cameras even if they print few (or none) of the images.

 

I still shoot mostly film because I collect and enjoy using film cameras. I also shoot some digital. Both have their good points. Years from now people will be looking for some of the digital photos which are being shot now but if they weren't printed soon after they were captured these images may never turn up. A young man at a local camera store told me with a straight face that a cd will keep digital image files safe for 50 years. Many of these cheaply turned out pieces of plastic are failing after only a few months. Digital photography is convenient, fast and allows endless manipulation of images but storage of its files is nowhere near as long lasting as film negatives.