Sony Photo Kiosk Article

In The News: The competitive battle to grab retail locations for photo kiosks is being ratcheted up by Sony with moves on both the technology and marketing fronts. Excerpt and pdf courtesy Photo Trade News magazine The race to deliver dye-sub prints to consumers in ever faster times has been a challenge to the kiosk industry. Slow print output tends to tie up a kiosk, preventing access by the next customer in line as well as frustrating the consumer waiting for his/her prints. Sort of like waiting for a pot of water to boil.

Sony has developed a new, higher-speed printer that is being incorporated into the Sony PictureStation. According to Dave Johnson, senior marketing manager, the new printer will reduce first print output from 23 seconds to about eight seconds for the first 4R and each print thereafter. He claims it is the industry’s fastest delivery off a single printer. A 5x7 from this printer takes 15 seconds, a 6x8, 20 seconds.

Others have dealt with the speed problem by incorporating two printers working in tandem. Johnson said that ganging two of Sony’s new printers, which can be done, would cut delivery to four seconds a print. By comparison, Kodak’s G-3 kiosks, with two model 6800 printers in tandem, output the first print in 11 seconds and each subsequent one in five seconds.

Pixel Magic outputs first print in 18 seconds and following prints in 10.5 seconds off one printer and half that time when two printers are ganged. At photokina, Pixel showed a four-printer setup with correspondingly faster output times.

To read the entire story download the pdf