Photo Kiosks:
The guys at this store won’t be enthused by Kodak’s most recent overtures to realize that long awaited appliance: the stand-alone photo kiosk.
“Digital PIC is a non-chemical process for developing standard color negative film. It produces a digital image file that can be used to print photographs and be written to a CD. As a result, Kodak’s will have the only kiosks capable of taking any input, including film, and giving the consumer the prints they want, in minutes.”
I eagerly anticipate the opportunity to walk over to such a machine (at any metro station, gas station, mall, convenience store), download the images from a full CF card to a CD, pay a few bucks, dump the CD in my bookbag, and resume shooting. Ideal for trips when you just don’t have enough extra removable media cards on your person, and it sure beats the stress of lugging around your notebook PC.
Consumers will no doubt wait to see whether the process actually produces non-corrupted images. Vendors will also need to address privacy concerns, and the inevitable prospect of some genius ‘getting their virus on’.
I referred to the system as an ‘appliance’ because there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be just that. Surely such a device would be great for in-home processing, where you just load your film, or insert your removable media, and the images are all transmitted to your computer’s hard disk. Let it not forget that it’s more environmentally friendly too!
